After learning that forecasters predicted a record-breaking hurricane season this year, Marilyn Rayon and her husband, Leo, spent thousands of dollars to trim trees and shrubbery around their home so a storm wouldn’t throw them into their house.
They took a practical precaution, heeding the warnings of elected officials and weather experts. Their utility company, CenterPoint, however, did not.
As Hurricane Beryl swirled toward Texas last month, its sustained winds persisted longer than typical cyclones. It flooded communities along the Gulf Coast, and in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, it snapped half of the city’s trees and downed power lines.
At the height of the power outages caused by the storm, nearly 3 million Texans were without power, and three weeks later, over 1,000 Southeast Texas homes and businesses were still without electricity. Most outages were in Houston, which mainly gets its power from CenterPoint. The company, which made nearly a billion dollars in profit last year, was tasked with maintaining the vegetation around its infrastructure and power lines, but over the past decade, they’ve been slow to do that work.
By the time Beryl hit Southeast Texas after ravaging Caribbean nations, it had died down to a Category 1 storm, the lowest possible designation above a tropical storm. However, it showed that despite billions invested in creating storm resilience at the local level and a revamped disaster recovery process at the federal level, even relatively weaker hurricanes create a deadly challenge for the South’s most vulnerable.
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It further exemplified the racial and climate implications behind the country’s need for an upgraded electric grid. At least 36 people died after Hurricane Beryl came ashore in Texas, but a large share of these deaths resulted from those left without air conditioning during the sweltering, swampy heat that follows hurricanes. Historically, Black people have borne the worst effects of power outages and are most likely to die when they take place.
Rayon and her neighbor Angela King believe the power crisis stems from companies prioritizing profits over actual needs.
Since 2021, the neighbors have been battling with the company over a new gas plant in their backyards. Last year, CenterPoint told Capital B that the new facility, which has elevated threats of environmental disaster for the neighborhood, was built to ensure that the company could keep the power on during “times of peak demand,” explicitly citing severe weather. In 2021, a winter storm hit Texas, resulting in an estimated 700 people deaths and 5 million Texans losing power for days, weeks, and, in extreme cases, over a month.
However, in a statement to Capital B following Hurricane Beryl, the company said the facilities were not used or “needed.”
“So why [is the plant] here,” Rayon said. “They spent money on this facility and didn’t spend money on trimming back the trees around the transformers, the power lines.”
Read More: A Gas Storage Plant and New Pipeline Disrupt Life for This Black Community
CenterPoint’s CEO, Jason Wells, has been grilled by residents, activists, and lawmakers for the company’s apparent failures, but he has told state regulators the utility is already working to better prepare for the next storm. He also said the company is doubling the size of the crew that manages vegetation around their power lines.
But for many residents, it may be too little too late. Despite Houston being the second-fastest growing metropolitan area in the country, last year, a large citywide survey found that about 60% of residents have considered leaving the city, with more than half of those citing extreme weather as the reason why.
“This is everything that we have been screaming, and now that this has happened the world can see how CenterPoint and the city is harming us,” said King, who says she thinks “about moving every day” due to Houston’s severe weather and constant grid failures.
Show me the money
Less than halfway through hurricane season, this year’s storms have caused as much damage as all of last year’s major storms. In Texas alone, Beryl caused an estimated $3 billion worth of damage, making it the state’s most costly storm since Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
This storm was the first major test of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s new recovery system, which institutionalized rules to help victims get financial support quicker with less paper shuffling and fewer rules. The most substantial change involved allowing disaster-stricken households to qualify for $750 to cover immediate expenses automatically.
Read More: Will FEMA’s New Rules Shorten Black Communities’ Road to Recovery?
Those impacted are also eligible to receive additional assistance from FEMA’s Individual Assistance Program for generators rented or purchased during the storm.
“It is unusual,” FEMA spokesperson Rebecca Kelly said of such a waiver. “The power outage was so extensive that FEMA has decided to activate this program to support this recovery.” The storm’s damage also triggered a FEMA program that pays for motels and hotels to allow displaced residents to stay for free.
In a statement to Capital B, FEMA said it had approved more than $337 million for Texas households, but did not specify a timeline on when residents would begin receiving checks.
The deadline to apply for the initial $750 is Sept. 10, but local news outlets have reported that residents are already frustrated with the agency.
Rayon, who is retired, said she was told that she could apply for the check by calling FEMA directly, but after days of attempting, she never reached anyone on the phone. Since 2020, the agency has increased its dependence on digital communication, which advocates say threatens seniors’ ability to navigate the recovery system.
Rayon said she also noticed that despite FEMA claiming to prioritize vulnerable populations, like the elderly and disabled, at least one of her neighbors, who has two people in hospice in her home, has struggled through the process.
King said a FEMA representative told her the checks were “sitting there in limbo.”
“Nobody has the information as to when or if anything is going to be mailed out,” she said.
“I know people are desperate, and we understand that, but we are working very hard, and we are trying to explain to everybody that it is a process, just to be patient,” FEMA spokesperson Alberto Pillot told ABC13 Houston last week after some residents complained that the revamped process is still not meeting the demands caused by the disaster.
Complaints may continue if the hurricane season reaches the high expectations of federal forecasters. FEMA is overwhelmed with a record number of billion-dollar disasters and new responsibilities, including the continued fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ever-growing homelessness and migrant care crisis. It also faces a highly partisan federal budget process that threatens to deplete its main relief fund. Last year, the agency denied the most disaster aid requests in nearly a decade. It may get worse. At the federal level, analyses show conservative leaders are less likely to fund disaster recovery efforts.
False solutions for shoring up the grid
The issue for communities like King’s and Rayon’s is that the solutions proposed by the state’s utility companies to prevent these catastrophic events have focused on building new fossil fuel power plants in areas already dealing with excess fossil fuel pollution.
The country’s power grid is a complex network of power plants, transmission lines, and distribution systems that generate and deliver electricity to homes and businesses. It is divided into three major regions, the Eastern and Western regions — and Texas. Texas’ electric grid is often criticized for its lack of resilience due to its isolation from the other grids, heavy reliance on fossil fuels and natural gas, and a slow investment in winterization and upgrades to its transmission lines.
The state, known for its historic oil resources, has argued that fossil fuel electricity sources are most reliable during disasters. However, studies have routinely shown that clean energy sources are just as dependable, if not more, and do not lead to the same levels of pollution choking Black neighborhoods.
A Capital B analysis of state data found that from the day leading up to Beryl’s landfall and the following day, roughly 90,000 pounds of toxic air pollution was dumped into the air. In times of severe weather, these kinds of releases are used to burn off combustible gasses in a controlled way so that they don’t collect inside a plant at dangerous levels, but they can lead to adverse health threats in the communities around the plants.
The releases alarmed activists. It’s as if the petrochemical industry “sees a tragic natural disaster occurring and asks the important question: ‘How can we make this worse?’” said Texas-based environmental organization Downwinders at Risk in a statement to Capital B.
Over the past year, Capital B has reported extensively on how the state’s inability to keep the lights on has contributed to poor health outcomes. CenterPoint shared with Capital B that it would employ artificial intelligence and predictive modeling to “harden its distribution system and speed restoration” during the next storm. However, as we reported last month, the growth of supercomputers for artificial intelligence in Texas has contributed to increasing the volatility of the state’s grid and pollution in Black communities because of the supercomputers’ extreme energy use.
It’s just another example of the region’s Black and Latino residents being let down, Rayon said.
“Nobody likes to be like, ‘I told you so,’ but the truth of the matter is we tried hard to let the world know that CenterPoint, the state, have not been good actors or working in good faith.”