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San Antonio (USA) – Houston (Texas), the fourth largest city in the United States, issued a suffocating heat alert, with more than a million homes without power for the fourth consecutive day and the city having to set up makeshift cooling centers to alleviate air conditioning shortages.
Power outages in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl last Monday sparked criticism of the community’s preparedness for the hurricane.
More than 1 million customers of CenterPoint Energy, the main energy provider in Houston and South Texas, were without service as of midday Thursday after days of scorching temperatures.
People have been complaining about food disappearing from refrigerators, especially children and the elderly who are unable to withstand the country’s record high temperatures.
User dissatisfaction and criticism put pressure on the city council, and Houston Mayor John Whitmire was forced to charge the company and demand that it speed up repairs.
«I’m not in the business of grading. My job is to say, ‘Let’s do it.’ We demand better of them,” he said of CenterPoint Energy at a news conference Wednesday.
The city and Harris County have installed multiple cooling centers, while the company is also providing generators to hospitals that have been forced to move patients to proper gyms to receive them.
Beryl has claimed at least eight lives, seven in Texas and one in Louisiana, and authorities fear the death toll could rise due to a lack of air conditioning when a wave of extremely hot and humid weather arrives, which stretched into Thursday night.
About 2.7 million people were without power Monday following the storm, including 2.3 million customers of CenterPoint Energy, which warned that at least 750,000 customers would be without electricity again before the end of the week.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who took over the emergency response while Gov. Gregg Abbott was in Asia, also faced criticism.
At a meeting in Houston on Thursday, Patrick used the disaster to intensify his fight with the Democratic administration and accused Harris County Executive, Democratic Judge Lina Hidalgo and President Joe Biden, on whom he placed some of the blame for the failed response. JS
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