Nearly a million homes, businesses in Texas still without power after Hurricane Beryl

By Arathy Somasekhar

HOUSTON (Reuters) -Nearly a million homes and businesses in Texas remained without power on Friday, five days after Hurricane Beryl made landfall with fierce winds and rain that knocked down trees and electricity infrastructure.

CenterPoint Energy, the largest power provider in Texas, said about 860,000 of its customers remained affected. It has restored power for over 1.4 million customers in the days since Beryl, according to its website.

Utility Entergy said Texas restoration crews had turned the lights back on for about 183,000 of 252,460 customers impacted by Hurricane Beryl as of Friday afternoon.

Entergy said it expects all customers impacted by Hurricane Beryl to be restored no later than Monday, adding about 75% of customer impacted should be restored by the end of Friday.

Frustrations mounted among residents as temperatures in Houston rose and the Heat Index topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius). Some businesses remained closed due to lack of power, while residents were forced to discard hundreds of dollars' worth of groceries.

"The recent hurricane was only a Category 1. We will likely face more hurricanes, and they could be stronger. Are we going to have the same problems? Will the company in charge of repairing the country be ready this time?" Soonkack Kook, founder of a coffee shop in midtown Houston, said in an Instagram post.

Meteorologists at Colorado State University this week raised their forecast for the severity of the 2024 hurricanes and called Beryl a harbinger of what could be a very active season. They now anticipate six major storms, categorized by winds over 111 miles per hour, up from an earlier forecast of five.

Beryl was the earliest Category 5 storm on record when it developed over a week ago, but hit the Texas coast as a Category 1 storm with winds around 80 miles per hour (130 kilometers per hour).

Kook's coffee shop has opened a pop-up outside as it has not had power for five days and cannot afford to be closed for that long.

CenterPoint has said it continues to work day and night and expects to restore 80% of impacted customers by the end of the day on Sunday, adding that since Monday, crews have replaced over 2,000 poles and addressed damage from more than 6,000 trees impacting lines and other electrical equipment.

Local residents without power looked for hotels and bookings on vacation rental platforms like Airbnb, but few options were available, many at high price points. Some said they were considering traveling out of town for the weekend, unable to cope with the lack of power and heat.

The median home in Houston would be habitable for four days during a heat event without power, a study last year by the U.S. Department of Energy and some national labs showed.

"When you lose air conditioning, the temperatures indoors get dangerous much more quickly in homes that are not well-insulated," said Lowell Ungar, director of federal policy for research organization American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

ENERGY RECOVERY

Beryl made landfall on Monday near Matagorda Bay in South Texas, only about 40 miles (64 km) from Freeport, Texas, which houses the country's third largest liquefied natural gas facility as well as numerous chemical facilities.

Freeport LNG, the third largest liquefied natural gas facility in the U.S., powered down on Saturday in preparation for Hurricane Beryl and has not yet resumed production of the superchilled gas, LSEG data showed. The company declined to comment on a time frame for the resumption of operations.

Chemical maker Dow had a process instability due to Hurricane Beryl and plant production rates were reduced, the company said in a filing to regulators. Dow said its Texas sites were running with some limitations due to power infrastructure issues in Freeport.

Olin, another chemical company, declared a force majeure on Wednesday for some product and aromatic shipments after Beryl caused damage to its Freeport facilities.

Chemical maker BASF said its facilities in Texas experienced minimal impact from Hurricane Beryl and the site was working to resume normal operations.

Formosa Plastics, which temporarily shut down operations at its Point Comfort plant after a malfunction with a gas compressor system, expects operations to be back to normal by the end of next week as it did not sustain any severe damage from Beryl.

Ports along the Gulf Coast, which had closed ahead of the hurricane, largely resumed operations and vessel traffic.

Repair to a navigational aid at the port of Freeport was expected to be completed on Saturday, a notice from a shipping agent showed.

The impact on refineries and offshore production platforms were limited.

(Reporting by Arathy Somasekhar in Houston; additional reporting by Curtis Williams in Houston, editing by Susan Fenton, Mark Heinrich and Josie Kao)