Frustrations are mounting across southeast Texas as residents enter a fourth day of crippling power outages and heat, a combination that has proven dangerous – and at times deadly – as some struggle to access food, gas and medical care.

More than 1.3 million homes and businesses across the region are still without power after Beryl slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 1 hurricane on Monday, leaving at least 11 people dead across Texas and Louisiana.

Many residents are sheltering with friends or family who still have power, but many can’t afford to leave their homes, Houston City Councilman Julian Ramirez told CNN. And while countless families have lost food in their warming fridges, many stores are still closed, leaving government offices, food banks, and other public services scrambling to distribute food to underserved areas, he said.

  • braxy29@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    i hear you, fellow texan. no fan of ercot, but reading this thread has been infuriating.

    for anyone else reading my comment - some years ago, i lived in oklahoma for a little while. years of drought, one year a lot rain. lots of trees with a lot dead branches weighted by new growth, then that winter an ice storm hit. trees bigger than my car came crashing down and it was all over the town i lived in. for three days in the silence, you could hear branches cracking and falling. two houses down a tree went right through their living room. one end of our street was impassable for several days until someone could cut one tree into small enough pieces to clear it.

    needless to say, power was out. parts of town had power back within days, some parts of the state, if i remember correctly, didn’t have power for weeks.

    grid stability or redundancy couldn’t have prevented that problem.

    https://www.weather.gov/oun/events-20071208

    • protist@mander.xyz
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      6 months ago

      Appreciate you. Outages like this happen all over the country when there are severe weather events, especially hurricanes. Folks on here seem to have a poor grasp of electrical systems and why the power’s out in parts of Houston