I get that people rightfully complain about "weather p*rn" and blowing things up to be bigger than they are....but I think the counter to that mistakenly minimizes the risk to a lot of people that isn't healthy. There were 85 mph winds at Bush Airport about 5 hours after landfall. Telling people, "oh, it's just a minimal storm" and "we really dodged a bullet" as it's about to or is making landfall isn't a good idea, imo. You're still dealing with an intense weather-maker, regardless....and it's absolutely gonna impact power lines and cause property damage.
I am over these weather experts. This sh** can't be predicted. This is worse than technical analysis for stocks. Life lesson: be prepared at any point to be without power/water for days if you live in Houston.
It's a bit ridiculous the magnitude and duration of power loss, it's almost expected now. Ike was the only event in my lifetime as a Houstonian that caused an extended and widespread power outage, but now I feel like we get one at least once a year, and now twice in the last 60 days. This just isn't right and Houston is too major of a metro to be this rag tag when it comes to essential utilities.
this is Ike all over again. happened 16 yrs ago and CenterPoint still haven't learned jack ****. get ready for no power for a minimum of 4 days. Some might be without power for 2 weeks.
Is there anything they can do about the cell signal? I find that being the most frustrating part. You might be able to get power through a generator or at a cafe, but just having spotty cell signal throughout the whole city is honestly the bigger burden for me. I don't remember it being this bad, but ever since the winter storm in 2021, feel like it's just part of every large storm.
yea, idk wtf is going on with cell signal. can't inform nor reach out to folks to know whether they're safe or not. it's not just one carrier, i think most if not all carriers are down. Best you could do right now is to go somewhere with wifi and hope that you're wifi-calling works.
here's how i see it's going to play out. city and Houstonian are going point fingers and blame CenterPoint for not well prepared for this storm. CenterPoint then turn point fingers to meteorologists and blame for downplaying the severity of the storm. Meteorologists then point fingers to city of Houston and Houstonians blame them for every time they hype up a storm/hurricane and then they get flamed by the people when barely anything happen. circle of blame game.
Also - definitely can sense more frustrations from everyone that the tornado. We, collectively, are getting tired and fatigued from these outages.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong…but the storm camped out with 60-80 mph winds for 5+ hrs is probably worse than 30 minute 120 mph winds in a not direct hit scenario where it moves fast. The ****er just hung on
That was truly the worst part, could not contact my team or my family. I have AT&T and this was the second time in 2 months this has happened. What was funny though was I was able to go up to HEB about 3 miles from house and it worked so I guess maybe its a tower thing.........it sucked, no power and then you cant even read about what's going on, talk about bored. It was back to somewhat normal this am at 5
I’d say that’s probably correct…also way more widespread than derecho, so it’s obviously gonna affect more people…and take longer to fix the problems after.
....and then, when they're homeless, we'll just put them in all of the new tax payer-paid-for corporation-run jails!
How are those maintenance costs looking in 2024? The best part, is they'll just pass these repairs costs onto us consumers with no upgrade in reliability. So next time storm, we'll just do it all over again. Regarding buried utilities: Water is buried. No outage. Natural Gas is buried. No outage. Drainage is buried. It works. Oil pipelines are buried. Most utilities are buried. Most utilities continue to work after wind events. I'm not sure why electric utilities were historically overhead while all other utilities were buried. Perhaps some sub-stations went out but those are easier to fix than inspecting/repairing 100k light poles (which, btw, are really ugly to look at). River Oaks has no overhead power lines. Hmmmm, I wonder why.
I understand not having power after a hurricane. Power lines damaged by high winds and trees. The power companies do proactively trim the trees to prevent outages. But, it’s impossible to protect all that infrastructure from a hurricanes wind and water. Not saying they couldn’t do better, but I do understand that hurricanes are very destructive. I do see where more utilities are being put underground. So, over time that should help. I’m less sympathetic towards power shortages during heat waves. No excuse for that. Texas will always be hot. Every single year.
I have 2 phones from 2 different services and 2 of them acted like dead phones. Cricket being the worst, never got internet services during and after the storm and TMobile was only good after midnight. I'm still having problem with the Cricket with group texting and not calling out. If the phone outages happened during Harvey, that would be even a bigger disaster. They may have to ask if the HPD who didn't make out of the storm had phone problems.
