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HOUSTON WITHOUT POWER SUPPLY FOR FOUR DAYS, DECLARED CITY IN CRISIS
Monday marked one week since Hurricane Beryl made landfall near Matagorda Bay, devastating Houston’s infrastructure and knocking out power to over 2.2 million homes and businesses.
While CenterPoint Energy has since restored power to the majority of those customers, hundreds of thousands of people still woke up Monday without lights, or air conditioning, or any number of the vital necessities made possible by the miracle of electricity.
The Houston Chronicle spent time with four households in different parts of the region Sunday to understand what a week without power does to the psyche, body and wallet. Here are their stories.
In the immediate aftermath after Hurricane Beryl, the sight of CenterPoint trucks would give Maria Noria some hope that maybe, finally, power would soon be restored to her sweltering east Houston home. By the end of the week, that hope had long since given way to frustration.
“The first couple days I was ok, thinking ‘they’re coming, they’re coming, they’re going to fix it,’ and then we started to hear it was going to take longer, and it started to bother me,” Maria Noria, 53, said in Spanish.
Noria lives with her husband and daughter in a bungalow in Houston’s Northshore neighborhood, north of I-10 between the East Loop and Beltway 8. A week without power has tested all of their patience, though the family maintained a friendly disposition and was quick to crack a joke, even as they wiped sweat from their brows.
“We’ve laid out the red carpet for you,” Noria said, as she led a pair of Chronicle journalists over a makeshift trail of concrete pavers, which helped us keep our footing in the muddy expanses of her backyard.
After two days without air conditioning, the family borrowed a generator from Noria’s sister, whose power returned to her home. The generator provided just enough wattage to light up the kitchen and power a few fans on the floor. During the day, they could concentrate all the fans in the living room; at night, they could place fans directly next to their bed for a modicum of relief.
The Norias have also learned, however, that using a generator can be both expensive and annoying. Maria’s husband, Adrian, has had to run outside at 5:30 a.m. to fill the gas engine. He estimated he’d spent at least $150 on gas in the past five days to keep the generator running.
After a week, the Norias, who moved to Houston in 2001, said they were still confounded about how they can still be without power after just a Category 1 storm. Even Hurricane Harvey only knocked their power out for a day or two.
“We’re Houston, the fourth-largest city in the country. ¿Que pedo?” Adrian Noria said in Spanish. “What gives?”
For Stacy Humphrey, 48, and Donnell Blake, 60, a week without power was the difference between life and death. A pitbull in the northeast Houston rooming house that Blake owns gave birth to a litter of puppies two days before Beryl made landfall. By the end of the week, half of the litter was dead.
“We couldn’t take them anywhere, they got to be with their mama, they’re newborn puppies,” Blake said. “There was one every dying every day. Their eyes just opened two days ago.”
Humphrey tenderly carried one of the survivors, small enough to fit in one hand, to the living room so we could introduce ourselves, though the near-total darkness in the house made it difficult to see, even in the afternoon. The dog’s fur was matted and sticky — you could feel it struggling in 92-degree heat — and the air, heavy with the smell of mildew, was thick enough to wade through. There were no generators here to provide even the most basic comforts.
Humphrey had subsisted on “scraps” since she’s had to throw out all the food in her refrigerator. Her days were spent out on the patio in front of the house. At night, she slept on the couch with the windows open, facing the street. The gentle breeze was worth the fear she got being vulnerable to intruders.
“It’s a whole lot of anxiety. That heat makes you fluctuate,” Humphrey said.
The dogs weren’t the only casualty of Hurricane Beryl at Blake’s rooming house. Near the back wall, two Oscar fish floated belly up at the top of an aquarium filled with putrid green water, lined with a thick white foam at the surface. The tank’s water filtration system can’t work without electricity. Humphrey said the water was clear before Beryl.
Amanda Bartusek, the Heights
Going a week without power is tough. Being gaslit about it after throwing all your food away and living in hotel rooms for several days makes it even worse.
Amanda Bartusek, 36, lives on a block in the Heights that has been without power since Beryl hit last Monday. On Saturday, CenterPoint released new outage maps that indicated her area’s service had been fully restored. The roar of generators up and down Prince Street on Sunday afternoon was proof that that was most certainly not the case, and no one has been able to get an explanation out of CenterPoint.
“Everyone is just up in arms, like ‘what can we do?” Bartusek said.
Bartusek moved to the Bayou City from Iowa for work as an attorney two years ago, and Beryl was her first hurricane as a Houstonian. Longtime residents assured her that a Category 1 storm would probably just knock out power for a day or too, and she stocked up on a little extra food and water to prepare. She didn’t think a generator would be necessary.
Seven days after the storm, Bartusek still came home every day to care for her cats and take them for a spin around the neighborhood in her car, soaking up the air conditioning. She’s been staying with her partner in hotels every night since Tuesday, and in addition to what she called the flagrant price gouging going on, most hotels don’t accept pets either.
Bartusek estimated that she’d spent about $2,000 on hotel rooms in the last week, spending up to $800 one night for relatively modest lodging. She hit her breaking point when she secured a room at one downtown hotel after searching for three hours, only to be told that her confirmation was mistaken after arriving to the lobby.
“You have a glimmer of hope that you won’t have to sleep in a 90-degree house tonight, and everybody rushed with their confirmations only to be told ‘sorry, there’s nothing we can do,'” Bartusek said.
Jose Griñan, 71, had made it through a week without power by accepting that certain things are out of his control and making the best of the situation. He used his “old boy scout tricks” to hook up the generator in his backyard to a constellation of fans around the house, and cooled himself down Sunday with an ice-cold “batido,” a banana-and-milk smoothie popular in his native Florida.
“You just got to smile through it,” Griñan, the retired Fox26 anchor, said with a laugh.
His wife, Kathryn Griffin, has taken a decidedly less laissez-faire approach. She has been trying to get CenterPoint on the phone for days, and on Sunday, a crew of linemen was finally outside working on the house.
“It’s hot, ain’t it!” she says as she steps through the back door of their home.
Griffin was steaming, and not just from the heat. The couple’s two-story house had been without power for a week, but the lofty ceiling in the main room left enough room for air to circulate that it’s bearable to stay indoors with the fans running. But like Bartusek, the couple had been getting calls that their power had been restored when it hadn’t been, and they worry about their neighbors, most of whom are senior citizens.
Griffin, the director of the human trafficking division for the Precinct One constable’s office, had just gotten home from Gov. Greg Abbott’s press conference Sunday at Gallery Furniture. She said she agreed with the governor that CenterPoint needed to be held accountable for their failures to prepare for and respond to Hurricane Beryl.
“CenterPoint is not the same company they were even two years ago. Now it seems to be money over people,” Griffin said.
Griffin was showing us the pole where a disconnected telephone box had been sparking dangerously over their backyard fence when a lineman in a neon shirt and cowboy hat came to tell her the power had been restored. In spite of the sweat beading on her forehead, Griffin’s makeup remained immaculate and only a few strands of hair are loose from her tightly pulled bun.
Griñan went inside to check the electricity. The lights and ceiling fans seemed to be working fine, he said.
Griffin needed more convincing. She walked to each external air-conditioning unit, which didn’t appear to be operating.”Not working,” she said. “And these are brand new.”
