Champions area, lost power at 7:15am yesterday, no internet at home but I went to HEB on Louetta and I was able to use it. Still no power this am but my work has POWER so I am happily at work (Hempstead and Clay area) Holy Moly, my neighbor on each side has a gas generator and they ran it all night.............as if sleeping wasn't hard enough I got to listen to that all night
I'm sick to death of privatized utilities. Particularly ones without competition. The edges of a cat 1 hurricane hitting a gulf coast city should not cause multi day blackouts. Now they admit out of town help wasn't staged ahead if the storm. Why, because that would have cut into profits in the event it wasn't bad.
Hey now, if the state keeps behaving and voting the same way it has for 30 years surely it'll get better!
They say it costs too much to bury electrical lines? How much does it cost everyone when we loose power twice in 3 months now? Texas government officials are full of crap. Hurricanes ae predictable. It would probably take 20 years to bury all the lines ...but let's get started. It's a bunch of knuckle draggers. To all of you who keep saying Houston is too big. It's not. Houston is the 4th largest city in the country, however Houston is ~50th in density. It feels dense because of our crappy traffic ...but those are also choices we keep making. At some point, we need to grow up and realize we can't keep doing to same crap. /rant Maybe I need AC.
It's interesting to read everyone's perspective on this storm. We got lucky. Never lost power or anything. And rainwater never got close to anyone's houses. So from my personal POV, it wasn't that bad of a storm. The biggest issue I had was that the wind woke me up at 4:15am yesterday. But a 5 minute walk from my house, people lost power for 12 hours or so. A 5 minute drive from my house, people still don't have power. Further away, people have no power and serious property damage. From those people's POV, this was a disastrous storm. Contrast this with the May storms, where it knocked out power for us for 3(?) days and ****ed up 4 of my trees. But for many others that weren't in certain parts of Greater Houston, if wasn't a big deal. Anyway, I realize nothing in this post is informative or insightful. Just saying. Life is weird.
Just saw on another site that the Whataburger app is more accurate than the Centerpoint app for determining power outages.
That is the way natural disasters are. I’ve seen blocks devastated by wildfire or tornado with one house standing. I’ve seen shorelines devastated by storm surge with oddly a single shack standing.
I’m surprised nearly 3 million lost power to a barely Cat 1 storm. I knew our infrastructure isn’t that great, but I didn’t think it was this bad.
I’m that neighbor, but I do shut it down at night. It’s a bit hot, but so what? People need to sleep.
I always thought the etiquette was to turn off gas generators at night. I could be wrong though... either or I hope you guys get power soon.
A bunch of the out-of-town electric crews had been staged at Sam Houston Racetrack since the last storm in May and then last week they all left which I though was odd seeing we had a storm coming. A Cat 1 should not be this devastating
The reason is because the city got bigger. In 2008 when Ike hit Houston had 4.7mil people. Now there are 6.8mil people. And the area got a lot bigger too. Now granted, you'd think after a big power outage post-Ike people would be clamoring for future housing development to take preventative measures like laying wires underground... but well 16 years later the results are what they are.
What did you think the complaints about ERCOT and Abbott were about? They are bought and paid for by the Power Companies so they don’t have to improve the infrastructure.
I don't know if burying the lines is the answer because there are areas in the Houston metro that have buried lines without power. Plus maintenance after is a doozy. Houston's city limits aren't up there in density because they are so large and include farmland, but Houston has a consistently dense urban area where it overs around 3-4k people per square miles. It's denser than the Philly, DFW, Boston, etc., urban areas. I think the problem with Houston is it was built way too cheaply and by the developer. Too many unincorporated areas. That Houston mess should not have extended past Beltway 8, let alone Highway 6. Imagine if areas like Spring, Greater Katy, Cypress, Klein, etc., were actual cities? Maybe they develop differently by implementing additional detention ponds for more storm runoff, don't approve building neighborhoods in reservoirs, don't have such high parking minimums where there are seas of 80% empty parking lots majority of the time, require developers build hurricane resistant fences vs these flimsy wood ones we see blowing everywhere, etc. This would have meant a more expensive Houston overall, but still one of the cheapest large cities in America. It'll take a lot to fix Houston because it was allowed to develop like this "with minimal regulation". This storm temporarily stalled a move back to Houston dream because the wife doesn't want to deal with not having power. When Ike hit, greater Houston had 5.7M Now it's actually at 7.5M (2023 Census - https://trerc.tamu.edu/data/population/?data-MSA=Houston-Pasadena-The+Woodlands,+TX). There are several housing developments with underground lines. South Katy has a bunch of underground lines and they didn't have power for a while. One of the biggest problems is the unnecessary concrete (see parking lots) that could have been more drainage instead.
