Houston-area residents frustrated as they enter sixth day without power and air conditioning in punishing heat

(CNN) — Hundreds of thousands of southeast Texas residents are entering the sixth day in a row suffering brutal heat without air conditioning and many are scrambling to find cool shelters, food, safe drinking water and health care resources.

More than 760,000 power customers in southeast Texas remain without power after Hurricane Beryl slammed the Gulf Coast Monday, leaving at least 10 people dead in Texas, two dead in Vermont and one dead in Louisiana.

Hospitals, assisted living facilities, schools and water treatment plants are scraping for resources after the outages debilitated infrastructure across the region. That has led to mounting frustrations from residents that Houston’s main utility provider – CenterPoint Energy – was not more prepared for the storm and renewed concerns over the state’s power grid.

Pregnant Houston resident Jordyn Rush, 32, worries for her health as the intense heat deprives her of sleep and her fridge sits empty while the outage drags on, making life difficult as she prepares to undergo a C-section in 12 days.

“It’s been an absolute nightmare,” Rush said. “I’m on the verge of like a mental breakdown. At this point, I can’t tell you the last time I was able to get a full night of sleep because it’s so hot. The lack of sleep is definitely wearing on me.”

CenterPoint Energy says it’s hoping to restore power to an additional 350,000 customers by Sunday, according to a statement Friday evening. Still, half a million Houston-area homes and businesses may not have their power restored until next week, the utility company said, even as triple digit heat indices remain in the forecast.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick criticized the utility in a post Friday, saying “we should not have roughly a million homes and businesses without power this far out.”

“We should not have had almost every traffic light down through yesterday, with many still down. We should not have had nine fire stations without power,” Patrick said. “Seniors in assisted living and nursing homes should have been more of a priority for power restoration.”

Since Beryl pounded the region, heat advisories have been issued every day for the greater Houston area, with high temperatures in the 90s and triple-digit heat indices. Combined with power outages, alarmingly dangerous consequences have ensued.

As residents desperately try to cool their homes with generators, carbon monoxide poisoning has become a serious concern.

In Fort Bend County, a neighboring suburb to Houston, more than 41 people suffered carbon monoxide poisoning, Judge KP George said at a news conference Friday. In Harris County, at least two people have died from carbon monoxide poisoning and fire departments received more than 200 carbon monoxide poisoning calls in 24 hours, local officials said.

The US Department of Health and Human Services on Friday declared a public health emergency for Texas.

“The combination of severe heat and limited access to electricity is dangerous, especially for vulnerable populations and those relying on electricity-dependent durable medical equipment and certain healthcare services,” said Dawn O’Connell, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, in a news release.

Senior care facilities and residents who rely on electric medical devices are particularly at risk. A 71-year-old woman woman died near Crystal Beach after her oxygen machine ran out of battery power and her generator shut down. CrowdSource Rescue, a nonprofit primarily serving as a search-and-rescue group, identified roughly 120 senior living facilities that need assistance and helped deliver generators and supplies to 16 so far.

A dozen Houston area hospitals are in a state of “internal disaster” and more than 40 dialysis clinics are struggling with outages, Texas Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd said in a news conference Thursday. Backed up hospitals prompted city officials to organize overflow beds in an indoor sports stadium, Lt. Gov. Patrick said Tuesday.

In addition to health care facilities feeling the strain, residents at home are struggling to find food and water.

Countless families have lost food in their warming fridges as many stores are shuttered, leaving government offices, food banks and other public services scrambling to distribute food to underserved areas. Scores of homes are also without drinking water as storm damage and power outages have left 135 wastewater treatment plants offline, according to Kidd.

For Rush, who has gestational diabetes, it’s been difficult to stay on the strict diet she needs to be on.

“I have to go in next week to do a pre-anesthesia lab draw and I’m hoping that my labs aren’t crazy from like a lack of nutrition and water,” she said. “My heart burn is out of control. I feel like I’m getting dehydrated.”

Beryl swept through the Houston area in an unusually early start to hurricane season, knocking out power for more than 2 million customers, only about two months after a powerful derecho in the area damaged skyscrapers, downed transmission towers and left downtown dark.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency granted Harris County and 14 other Texas counties financial assistance for impacted families as they face substantial repairs for homes damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Beryl.

In the meantime, officials are racing to find ways to help residents beat the sweltering heat.

Galveston, located south of Houston, is using transit buses to give some residents an “air conditioned respite” as portions of the city remain without power after Hurricane Beryl, according to City Manager Brian Maxwell. The city has also been distributing ice and providing portable showers. In Fort Bend County, emergency medical services is providing oxygen refills, electricity to power oxygen concentrators and rides to cooling centers.

Frustration mounts with Houston utility provider

The crisis comes more than three years after massive power outages hit the state. In February 2021, a deep freeze killed more than 200 people and left millions of customers without power and heat for days. Now, the ongoing outages have turned attention back to the state’s power grid.

Gov. Greg Abbott has requested an investigation into CenterPoint Energy and other electric companies in the wake of the outages, Patrick said at a news conference Thursday.

Patrick on Friday criticized CenterPoint Energy’s communication with customers and said they should have been ready for any storm hitting the Houston area.

“People have a right to be extremely frustrated with CenterPoint. People are suffering through terribly oppressive heat, a lack of food and gasoline availability, debris everywhere, and much more,” Patrick said. “The poor and most vulnerable are suffering the most.”

CenterPoint in a statement Friday said it had been tracking Beryl’s trajectory and preparing for its impact nine days before it made landfall. The company said it had increased crew members from 3,000 to 12,000 in response to the storm.

CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells told the Houston Chronicle he is proud of the progress the company has made toward restoration but acknowledged customers’ frustrations about not knowing when they will have power again.

“I think we could do a better job of communicating expectations with our customers, and I personally own that,” Wells said.

During a news conference Thursday, Patrick was asked by a reporter whether the state is considering modifying the power grid, which has encountered several issues over the years due to severe weather.

“The grid is a whole different issue which we’re addressing, have been addressing, and will continue to address,” Patrick said. “The power is down because the lines are down, and the transmission lines are down primarily because trees fell on them.”

Displacement brings back memories

Houston resident Destinee Rideaux, 33, is displaced for the second time after a hurricane – and this time it’s because her home is too hot to live in.

Because her apartment gets as hot as 96 degrees during the day, she’s been forced to stay at different friends’ apartments each night and carry around her belongings in her car. And Rideaux says she’s “exhausted.”

It brings back her memories of being displaced from her home in Iowa, Louisiana, during Hurricane Laura in 2020, she said.

“We evacuated the day she hit. The next morning, we were able to get footage of the home and it was flattened. It was picked up and thrown across the yard and flattened. And everything we had was thrown across the yard,” she told CNN.

For Rush, the crisis is a repeat of the derecho in May, when her home didn’t have power for six days.

“We had to clear our fridge completely for the second time in less than two months. It’s our second time in less than two months of being displaced from our home,” Rush said. “We are left without any communication or updates, so we have no idea what kind of plans we need to make or if we need to make preparations to find a hotel because most of the hotels here are completely booked.”

After Rideaux’s Louisiana house was destroyed, she stayed with friends in the Houston area, and then decided to stay there permanently for a fresh start.

“It’s frustrating to be back in this position of just displacement,” Rideaux said. “During Laura, every day I didn’t know what that day would bring, where I was going to go. You also have the mental thing going on of like becoming a burden on other people.”

But Rideaux said this time isn’t nearly as difficult because she’ll be able to return to her home eventually.

“Once the power comes back on, I have a home to go to,” she said.

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CNN’s Kara Mihm, Sarah Dewberry, Ed Lavandera, Ashley Killough and Elizabeth Wolfe contributed to this report.