Hurricane Beryl made landfall in southeast Texas Division 1 power earlier this weekit’s gone Massive flooding and for power outages About 3 million homes and businesses on his eve. More than that until Friday morning One million Texas power customers are still in the dark.
Hurricane Beryl was unprecedented in many ways – it marked the beginning of the hurricane season A tropical storm has increased to Category 5 strength When it reaches that level July 2 – Yet it was predictable. So were his consequences.
Exceptionally warm waters in the Atlantic Ocean served as fuel for the storm while a growing La Niña in the Pacific created a fertile atmosphere for hurricane formation, allowing Beryl’s winds to whip up. 170 miles per hour. Scientists tracking these trends issue a warning “Above normalMonth long hurricane season.
But the storm’s impact on vulnerable infrastructure and its convergence with extreme temperatures were just as predictable.
Beryl is the latest example of a compound disaster, where multiple extreme weather events intersect at the same time, or where fallout from one exacerbates the damage of another.
It’s just one thing after another
Beryl hits a region that is still recovering from the devastation caused by wind and water this year. The Houston area experienced severe flooding in early May when a heavy downpour drenched the area upstream. 23 inches of rain. A band of severe thunderstorms known as The derecho then galloped across Texas on May 16 and charged into Houston, tearing off roofs, breaking windows and downing power lines. Memorial Day weekend saw another burst of thunderstorms and tornadoes, battering Houston with winds. 88 miles per hour.
Back and forth this storm Stress infrastructure and degradation of essential resources. They also left little time to rebuild, leaving roads, power lines, and sewer systems to harden against future disasters.
Then Beryl comes up with her own destruction suit. It pushes, dumps, a deadly stormwater ashore Up to 15 inches of rainAnd if Tornadoes are born which pushed trees into houses and utility poles. Power companies are warning residents to stay put 35 feet away from power lines.
Now a heatwave is baking the region, threatening Poor Houstonians Those without power need it most. At a city council meeting this week, officials pressed a representative of CenterPoint Energy, Houston’s main electricity supplier, about the ongoing outage.
Hurricane Beryl is the culmination of a story we’ve been reporting for months
The factors leading up to Hurricane Beryl have been in the making for a long time. Read more of Vox’s report on how climate change affects ocean temperatures, heat waves, and increases the risk of such compounding disasters:
Hurricane Beryl is the ferocious storm scientists have been hoping for
How La Nina will shape heat and hurricanes this year
How one extreme weather can make the next more dangerous
This sea temperature chart will really scare you
The world’s oceans are extremely hot. We’re about to find out what happens next.
El Nino is nowhere near as catastrophic for Earth’s weather
2023 was the warmest year on record. It has pushed the world over a dangerous line.
As Colin D. Guzman reports Houston Public Media, Brad Tutunjiun, CenterPoint’s vice president of regulatory policy, told the meeting that his company conducted drills before Beryl and assembled repair crews. But he noted that “storms are more frequent. They’re more severe, and we have to change our paradigm about how we look at things.”
Officials were not convinced. “We’re past the point of saying it wasn’t predictable,” said City Council member Abby Kamin.
CenterPoint applied for a $100 million grant Last year the U.S. Department of Energy asked the U.S. Department of Energy to strengthen its cables and poles to withstand extreme weather, but the agency rejected the proposal.
Some blamed the slow recovery on a lack of preparation on the city’s part before Houston Mayor John Whitmire took office. “Yes, I am outraged at the level of neglect at this stage,” he said Told the City Council.
The city is no stranger to extreme weather, and its flat, rugged, low-lying terrain has made it a long time Notorious for flooding. The most striking example was Hurricane Harvey seven years ago, which inundated Houston with an incredible 27 trillion gallons of water. The wettest hurricane ever measured in the Atlantic. It’s racked up $125 billion in lossesThis made it the second costliest hurricane to make landfall in the continental United States after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
And the state of Texas has become notorious for its weak energy infrastructure. The Texas power grid is largely isolated from its neighbors so it cannot easily draw power from other states if its supply is disrupted. Its free-wheeling state energy market prioritizes plenty of cheap electricity to maintain backup power reserves and invests in protecting against severe weather.
These factors led to massive blackouts across the state after Winter Storm Uri hit in 2021, freezing natural gas pipelines, coal piles, wind turbines and solar panels just as cold Texans turned up the heat. The state is also struggling to keep up with summer energy demand as average temperatures rise and cooling needs increase.
The future may pose even greater challenges. of Texas Population is increasing, so there will be more people who need more energy. And climate change is making the effects of many of these disasters worse, raising average temperatures and water levels. That means more Texans are likely to end up in harm’s way when disaster strikes.
This pattern is repeating itself in many parts of the world. Much of humanity will be haunted by past catastrophes as the specter of further catastrophes lurks on the horizon.
Reducing these risks thus requires thinking beyond hurricanes as isolated events, and instead as events built on the debris of past storms whose shock waves will reverberate for years to come.
