Days after Beryl, Texans toil to cope with debris, heat, rain and no power

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SARGENT — A 30-foot garage structure, dismembered into rubble. An RV, tipped over. The last vestige of a boat dock, sitting in a front yard.

People love Sargent, a town on the Gulf Coast, for its beach homes and friendly atmosphere.

But days after Hurricane Beryl tore through communities along the coast and farther inland, snatching trees out of the dirt and knocking out power for millions of Texans, Rod “Doc” Pierce, a 70-year-old handyman with a cigarette and a cup of vodka, reached back to his days on the battlefield to relay what he saw: “It looks like Vietnam after a bomb raid,” he said on Wednesday.

Pierce lives on an RV site that saw water rise to hip-level during the storm, which slammed Texas as a Category 1 hurricane early Monday. Since then, he has had no power and no idea of when it would come back. It was so hot inside his RV without air, he said, that he slept on a chair outside overnight on Tuesday.

Pierce was one of 1.3 million Texas customers still without power as of Wednesday evening, with the full restoration process expected to take days or more. Matagorda County, which encompasses Sargent, was the “hardest hit” of all 121 counties included in the state’s disaster declaration.

In Houston, the city at the center of the storm, Mayor John Whitmire said on Tuesday afternoon: “Twenty-four hours ago, we were on the dirty side of a dirty hurricane. We saw it coming. It was very unpredictable.”

State and local officials fielded residents’ frustrations and questions about whether the state and its largest power providers were adequately prepared for the storm. And they tried to mitigate the public health and safety risks arising from what is now becoming routine in Texas: large-scale power outages after natural disasters, which are only growing worse with climate change.

Beryl killed at least 10 people, according to officials, including two in Harris County who died when trees fell on their residences, and a city of Houston employee who drowned in a flooded underpass. Two people in Harris County died from carbon monoxide poisoning, and a 71-year-old woman in Galveston County died after she lost power in her RV home and her oxygen machine ran out of battery power.

Hospitals were crowded, as discharges were delayed to avoid returning patients to powerless homes, backing up new admissions.

In Sargent, where Pierce lives, about 2,500 customers serviced by Jackson Electric Cooperative may not have power for another two weeks, Matagorda County Judge Bobby Seiferman said on Wednesday.

“Prepare to be without power for a few more days as severe flooding, downed poles, trees, debris, and obstacles are hindering our restoration work in many areas,” Jackson Electric Cooperative said in a Tuesday evening Facebook post. “We do not have an estimated time for restoration. Anyone who depends on electricity for life-sustaining equipment should have a back-up plan in place.”

Texans needing to escape the heat and charge their phones turned to cooling centers opened by state and local officials.

Elizabeth Powell, 19 years-old and four months pregnant, felt the heat in her muscles as the small generator keeping her lights on burned through more than $60 worth of gasoline and struggled to keep her home in Corrigan, a city in Polk County, cool. She jumped at the chance to cool off when she learned that the city hall, just across the street, had opened to the public.

She worried about staying hydrated and cool enough to keep her son safe. She worried about her fiancé, who has been helping clear damage across the city. And, exasperated, she said she did not know when her power would be restored.

“Gosh, this is horrible. Like, it’s horrible,” Powell said on Wednesday. “I can’t use my AC, my fan, can’t cook enough food.”

The cooling center was opened precisely for residents like Powell, Corrigan City Manager Darrian Hudman said. The city escaped the worst of the storms that battered East Texas during his 11-year tenure, but this time around, Beryl knocked out power for every single one of his constituents, he said.

In Livingston, Polk County’s seat, a line of cars grew quickly on Wednesday along the access point to the city’s cooling station and to Pedigo Park, where county officials had readied water, ice and ready-to-eat meals for distribution — which ran out in three hours.

Information about the power restoration process had been scarce, even for county officials trying to keep their residents safe, according to Kari Miller, assistant to Polk County Judge Sydney Murphy.

Most of the 1.5 million Texas households and businesses without power in the state’s southeast region receive electricity through CenterPoint Energy, which said it had restored power to around 1 million customers by Wednesday afternoon.

“We take our responsibility of serving our customers and working as safely and as quickly as possible to restore service very seriously,” said CenterPoint Senior Vice President of Electric Business Lynnae Wilson. “At the same time, we fully understand our customers are hot and growing more impatient with their outages.”

Questions about utilities’ preparation and response percolated on social media, and state and local officials, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, insisted they would hold CenterPoint accountable for any failures in planning.

CenterPoint rejected the idea that it was not sufficiently prepared for the storm, saying it had readied more than 10,000 workers in anticipation of Beryl’s impacts and could not safely deploy them until the storm cleared its service area around 3 p.m. on Monday.

American Electric Power Texas, which delivers electricity to more than one million customers in south and west Texas, cited challenges including downed transmission lines, broken poles and debris in its restoration effort.

“The repair efforts have been massive,” AEP spokesperson Vee Strauss said, adding that the company mobilized crews from across the state and from sister companies in other states last week.

In the meantime, Texans were banding together and making do.

While most of the households in Ace, about half an hour south of Livingston, went without power, few residents used the cooling station set up by the volunteer fire department.

Assistant Fire Chief James Higginbotham, 28, said the station had wanted to provide what they could for the small community. Ace has been without power since Monday, but outages were not uncommon and residents knew how to cope, he said.

“In this area, here,” he said, “most people live on the lower side, so they don’t have much. But they manage.”

At the Polk County Commerce Center, where the AC was running just a bit too cold for comfort, Marilyn Mayville, 72, read her Bible while wrapped in a thick sweater. She’s seen her fair share of storms in the 15 years she has lived in East Texas, and the best thing to do, she said, was to keep the faith. The Family Life Church, where she has attended services since moving into Livingston, was holding a flashlight service Wednesday night, and she was excited to go.

“God takes care of you, and he takes care of your needs,” she said. “In my opinion, he’s taken good care of me.”

On the coast, residents pulled onto a rocky drive-through pickup station at Sargent’s volunteer fire department on Wednesday for supplies. Volunteers — some who suffered from their own power outages — were hard at work in the rain and to the soundtrack of a rattling generator. They handed out safety goggles, roofing materials, gallons of water and packages of food. Across the street, a large tree lay ripped out of the ground.

“It's been challenging. But it's really, you know, the phrase, ‘We've taken lemons and made lemonade out of it,’ ” said Bob Howard, 54, a trustee with the department whose home was damaged in the storm. “The community response has been unreal.”

Tony Cantu, 58, wept when he saw the damage on his property in Sargent upon returning from his Cypress residence after the hurricane. It was devastating, he said, to have to deal with such destruction in a place he invested blood, sweat and tears to build. But once his tears dried out, Cantu said, “I buttoned up my britches and got to work.”

As they waited for the power to come back on, he said he and his neighbors would work to rebuild what they lost.

“The community has come together,” Cantu said. “I didn't have a generator. Somebody brought me a generator. So we're all just kind of working, trying to make it through this horrible situation.”

Gilbert Franklin, 76, pulled up to the station on Wednesday for water and ice. His home nearby didn’t experience extensive damage, but he planned to stay with his sister-in-law, who has power, until his comes back on.

“This hurricane kind of creeped up on the state,” Franklin said. “We didn't really realize that they were going to have this much gusts and rain and everything.”

He’s grateful that things did not turn out worse.

“The material things can be replaced,” he said, “but a life cannot be replaced.”

Disclosure: CenterPoint Energy has been a been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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