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Beryl on track to make a Texas landfall on Monday morning
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- Title
- A very frazzled Beryl attempting to put itself back together on a path to Texas
- Authors
- Matt Lanza
- Published
- Jul 6 2024
- Word count
- 808 words
The companion Space City Weather post for Houston: https://spacecityweather.com/beryl-on-track-to-make-a-texas-landfall-on-monday-morning-what-to-expect-in-greater-houston-area/
If you live near the coast and have not made preparations yet, you need to do that today.
If you live near Houston, especially in one of the areas that suffered an extended power outage earlier this year during the derecho, I would especially recommend you stock up on whatever supplies you might need to sustain yourself for a week without power (water, canned food, candles, etc).
Flooding might be a thing and yes it doesn't hurt to be prepared. Water is more important than food.
Beryl tracking toward Matagorda, center likely to pass near west side of Houston: Serious impacts expected
Beryl will bring damaging winds, heavy rain into Houston area beginning tonight
1.95 million households without power (and counting).
Honestly, I’m really frustrated that I live in the fifth largest metro area in the United States, but I still need to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a home power generation system because the grid is so unreliable.
This city has been dealing with natural disasters since its foundation. Incompetence and negligence are the only excuses for its complete lack of infrastructure resiliency.
Kind of insane that utilities and insurance are even allowed to be for-profit companies. Seems like such an easy win to mandate they reorganize as non-profits or cooperatives exclusively. Enforce a 40x max pay delta on the lowest paid employee or contractor to the highest annual net worth increase for the executives.
Ten and a half hours later, power has been restored to my neighborhood.
I wasn’t checking very often, but the highest number of simultaneous customers without power that I saw on CenterPoint’s tracker was 2.3 million. CenterPoint Energy has approximately 2.8 million customers in the Houston area. It is the utility monopoly for the area, and its percentage of customers without power serves as a reliable measure of outage conditions.
So remember folks, if you’re ever thinking about buying a house near Houston, add $20,000 (at least) to the price of your home to factor in a whole home generator (and even more if you want to do solar + batteries).
I just don't quite understand why power lines aren't buried in Houston. It's not like this is the first hurricane to ever hit there. Surely the cost of burying lines is less than the cost of paying linesmen hazard pay and replacing hundreds, possibly even thousands of miles of line? Not to mention the economic cost and the increased potential for loss of human life.
If Florida can bury their lines, so can Texas. Hell, we bury them up here in Canada too, not for the hurricanes but the ice and downed trees in winter mostly. We also do get strong winds at times in the prairies. The complaints of "underground cables are expensive to repair" make sense if you're having to constantly repair them like you would in a hurricane. But realistically, having to dig them up and repair is rare, at least where I am. So it just boggles the mind. I guess the earlier comments alluding to profit over all are the correct answer, sadly :/
My understanding is that:
In the short term, it's apparently cheaper for CenterPoint and other companies to just do mass repairs after major events like this, than it is to actually replace existing infrastructure with underground transmission, or any other more resilient infrastructure. Supposedly, after much more severe natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey (or a Category 4/5 hurricane) the federal government foots the vast majority of the bill anyways. The incentives for utilities to "beef up" the infrastructure just aren't there, one way or another.
(Texas seems to be averaging at least one of these mass power outages a year for the past decade, by the way. Sometimes it's a hurricane. Sometimes it's a random-ass unexpectedly strong thunderstorm. Other times, it's a winter storm, and thousands of people freeze to death, but the governor sweeps it under the rug and we never talk about it again.)
In the long term, CenterPoint and other companies can boil the frog by slowly increasing rates to match increasing short term costs. As for whether that continues to be true in the face of increasingly brutal climate change, CenterPoint seems to think it does.
As for "the economic cost and the increased potential for loss of human life", for-profit companies generally do not give one iota of a fuck, unless it is them eating the cost, and for that to happen in Texas would require removing Republicans from power.
It's really important to understand, to the Republicans in Texas government, CenterPoint Energy and monopolies like it are the point. These are measures of success for them. Look at our big, successful Texas businesses that are thriving thanks to deregulation! Suck that California!
This is why stupid shit like #HoustonStrong makes me vomit. These people are not strong, they're fucking cattle. Their ability to come together in the face of disaster neither makes them unique nor worthy of praise, it's the absolute fucking least they are expected to do as human beings and as a community.
/vent
Okay, sorry for getting a little heated. I've been up since a particularly noisy gust of wind hit my window at 5:15 AM, and nothing today has really contributed to lowering the grump factor. I hope I answered your question. Honestly, I would really love it if someone more knowledgeable about electrical infrastructure than me could chime in and give their opinion too.
Not to worry about getting a bit heated, I get equally as frustrated with inept governments and businesses that continually put profits ahead of everything else.
Perhaps if there were incentives to care for the existing infrastructure and even government kickbacks to replace and improve said infrastructure, there might be something gained eventually. But yeah... Sounds like that's a prayer in hell.
As to the deregulation, I suppose Texas GOP just is very well practiced at keeping their heads in the sand because when shit like this happens - they're the laughingstock of the nation. Doesn't help that Abbot fled the country either, I know his trip was planned long before the hurricane but pretty sure almost all the models had it hitting some part of Texas as a cat 1 or tropical storm, so that just seems flimsy and reminiscent of Ted Cruz also fleeing. I feel like a good leader would cut the trip short at the very least and fly back ASAP.
Wishing you the best and hope you manage to get some rest - storms take their toll on everything.
Can't argue that it's not insane, but it's certainly not surprising. Texas in particular has drunk the deregulation Flavor-Aid pretty deeply. No matter how much incompetence or corruption becomes apparent in any industry, utilities or otherwise, the Texas GOP will never acquiesce to increased regulation.
The only exception that seems plausible to me is if minorities and leftists begin to organize and arm themselves for community defense. You might see some firearms regulation then, if the history of state-level GOP is any guide.
Honestly, as someone in Texas (even if I am leaving very soon), this statement has both nothing to do with the subject at hand and is a point so tired (not to mention outdated and the fact that it was California with the anti-black NRA-led gun regulations) that any time it's brought up it's just an easy identifier that the person that did so is likely utterly uninformed on the matter.