‘We can’t sleep’: Houstonians still without power struggle to stay cool

HOUSTON — Three days after a devastating thunderstorm tore through Houston, the nation’s fourth-most-populous city began lurching back onto its feet Sunday.

Power returned to hundreds of thousands of homes but still remained out across hard-hit areas not far from downtown. Traffic crawled through blackened intersections or down neighborhood streets now lined with limbs and leaves piled up like green-brown snow banks.

Clear skies helped dry out the sopping city over the weekend but also presented a new danger as temperatures climbed to around 90 degrees and were expected to stay. More than 350,000 electrical customers across huge swathes of Houston and its northwest suburbs started the day without service, cutting off the air conditioning that helps make the Gulf Coast heat bearable.

“We can’t sleep,” said Dolores Valladares, 61, with sweat on her brow as she sat outside her home in the city’s East End, watching her grandchildren.

Inside was even more stifling. Her food had spoiled, and she has struggled to get a reimbursement for her food stamps. Instead, she has been relying on nearby fast food chains that have power for cheap food and cool air.

“The darn heat,” said Mayor John Whitmire during a news conference Sunday evening. “It’s getting hotter as we talk.” He said the city had opened cooling centers and was providing free rides for residents to get to them.

The local electric company, CenterPoint Energy, has been racing to repair lines that had fallen from the force of the wind or under the weight of trees, saying it had done so for more than a half-million customers within 48 hours of the storm Thursday evening. A quarter of a million were fixed from Saturday into Sunday.

The outages were so widespread that even the company’s own online outage tracker — frequently used by Houstonians to check their service — was overwhelmed and stopped working reliably.

A company spokesperson said CenterPoint had around 7,000 workers out performing repairs, including thousands of additional power line workers and “vegetation management personnel” who were brought in from surrounding areas.

The company expected to restore service to 80% of its affected customers by Sunday evening. But that would most likely still leave around 200,000 without service into the start of the week. Some would not have power until the end of the day Wednesday, the company said.

Elsewhere in the city, Sunday routines carried on unbroken in neighborhoods that never lost power or quickly regained it. Church bells rang.

Golfers and joggers sweated it out in Houston’s central Hermann Park, confident that air conditioning awaited them at home. Travel sports teams gathered for games.

Parents waited anxiously for updates on their children’s schools in the city and surrounding suburbs. Most of the 274 schools in the Houston Independent School District, which closed Friday, had power and were set to reopen Monday. But dozens were still without electricity.

Schools would remain closed Monday for more than 150,000 students in two other local public school districts, Cypress-Fairbanks and Spring Branch, officials said.

Along Interstate 10, utility trucks could be seen massed in box store parking lots before deploying. In hard-hit neighborhoods, chain saws hummed, joining the rumbling of diesel generators powering the homes of those lucky enough to have them.

“There’s a lot of neighborhoods, maybe within a 2-mile radius, who’s had their power restored as of yesterday,” said Dewayne Williams, 43, who lives with his family in Cypress, Texas.