Tropical Storm Beryl tore through the heart of Houston on Monday, turning roads into rivers, killing at least four people and knocking out power to more than two million customers in Texas.
The storm, which made landfall Monday morning as a Category 1 hurricane, weakened as it passed over the city and continued its northward track.
But the relatively modest official force underestimated its power, local authorities said. As it tore through Houston, officials warned people to stay indoors and away from windows, “as if a tornado was coming at you,” Lina Hidalgo, the top official in Harris County, which includes Houston, warned residents.
The center was just west of the city, meaning Houston took the brunt of the storm as the hurricane turned counterclockwise.
On Monday afternoon, officials began to survey the devastation as residents emerged to see a landscape of downed power lines, damaged homes, toppled trees and water lapping along the streets. The city’s airports remained closed into the afternoon due to persistent high winds.
Houstonians have long been accustomed to power outages and severe weather. But Beryl, which began as an unusually powerful storm in the Caribbean, offered a bad omen, hitting early in a hurricane season that is predicted to be unusually active.
“The wind gusts were much stronger than I expected for a Cat 1,” said Julie Kickham, who rode out the storm in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood. “It makes me nervous for the rest of the hurricane season.”
It was the second time in less than two months that residents saw their city battered by winds and plunged into darkness. Before hurricane season had even begun, an unexpectedly powerful storm struck Houston and its surrounding suburbs in May, killing at least seven people and leaving hundreds of thousands without power for days.
Many more people were without power on Monday, with about one in five Texas electricity customers without power by noon. Most of the more than 2.7 million outages were caused by a single utility, CenterPoint Energy, in the Houston area.
“I have no power,” Mayor John Whitmire said at a news conference. “We are all in this together.”
Officials warned that it could be days before many people in the city have power and air conditioning restored, with temperatures expected to reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) on Tuesday. In areas where residents could afford them, the sounds of backup generators could be heard in the streets.
Two people were killed in their homes, officials said, crushed under the weight of trees blown down by the wind. One was a man at home with his family in the Atascocita area north of Houston; the other, a 74-year-old woman, was killed in a northwest neighborhood near Interstate 45, officials said.
A third victim, a civilian employee of the Houston Police Department, drowned when his car was submerged in high water, Mayor Whitmire said. The employee was exiting a freeway and ended up in a flooded tunnel. Mr. Whitmire said the man tried to call other members of the department for help, but they were unable to reach him in time.
A fourth death, caused by a house fire on Monday morning, was also linked to the storm.
Like previous major storms to hit the city, Beryl has transformed Houston’s urban landscape.
Trees blocked roads. Toads, whose mating calls are usually heard when the weather cools at night, sang in the daylight. Parts of highways filled with water, hurled into whitecaps, like rough seas in the middle of a city.
A rescue team used a crane to pull a man from a pickup truck that was surrounded by rough, rising water along Highway 288. At least eight people had been rescued from the high water by mid-day, said Thomas Hardin, assistant police chief.
Several Houston bays, which help drain water from the city during storms, were filled to their banks, or in some cases overflowing. The counties flood warning system showed several places where the bays were congested, including one close to the city centre.
The fuel giant Marathon Petroleum said on monday that the Galveston Bay refinery was temporarily without power during the storm and that the company burned off excess gases as a safety measure.
But unlike Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which stalled over the city and dumped rain for days, Beryl moved through Houston relatively quickly, causing floodwaters to slowly recede in the afternoon without causing widespread industrial damage.
Later in the day, some coastal areas began to emerge from the storm and return to normal. In the city of Galveston, along the Gulf of Mexico, several people gathered at Robert’s Lafitte bar, two blocks from the beach. Owner Scott Butler said the bar had no electricity but plenty of drinks.
The storm was expected to move through East Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, and Texarkana, Arkansas.
The reporting was provided by Ivan Penn, Steve Kenny, Edgar Sandoval And Rick Rojas.
