Houston is still hot. In the days after Hurricane Beryl tore through Texas on July 8, 2024, the sun returned. So did the humidity. What did not return, for more than 2.7 million households and businesses, was electricity.
That combination — stifling heat and no air conditioning — turned a weather disaster into a public health crisis. Ten deaths have been linked to heat exposure or the failure of medical equipment that needed power to run. The storm itself killed 44 people across the region, mostly from drownings and falling trees. But the aftermath has become a story about infrastructure, not just weather.
Beryl made landfall near Matagorda, a coastal town southwest of Houston. It was strong. It knocked over trees. It dumped rain. Then it moved on. What stayed was the power outage, and with it, the slow creep of heat exhaustion into homes where people waited for lights to come back on.
CenterPoint Energy is the utility serving the Houston metropolitan area. It is based in Houston. It has faced sharp criticism for how it handled the blackout. The company has not commented on the specifics of its response. That silence has not helped.
The scale of the outage is worth restating: 2.7 million customers lost power. That is not a small number. That is roughly the population of Chicago, sitting in dark, sweltering homes. Some of them died. At least ten of the storm’s total fatalities are now attributed not to Beryl’s winds or floodwaters, but to the heat and the lack of working medical devices that followed.
This is not a new pattern. Texas has a history of severe weather knocking out its power grid. The winter storm of 2021 caused widespread blackouts and hundreds of deaths. That was cold. This is heat. The common thread is a system that struggles to stay online when conditions turn extreme.
The federal government has moved in. The White House was briefed. President, unnamed in official statements, pledged support. FEMA has been deployed to the region. Aid and resources are flowing. But aid does not turn on a refrigerator. Resources do not power a ventilator. The gap between promise and delivery is measured in days, and in this heat, days matter.
CenterPoint Energy now faces scrutiny that will likely stretch into weeks. Lawmakers, customers, and journalists are asking questions. How many crews were staged before landfall? Why did restoration take so long? Were vulnerable populations prioritized? The company has not answered.
The storm itself was a natural event. The death toll from the outage was not. That is the distinction driving the current anger. Beryl did not turn off the medical equipment. The loss of power did. And the loss of power lasted long enough to kill.
Houston is a sprawling, car-dependent city. Its population is diverse, with many elderly and low-income residents who cannot easily flee to a hotel or a relative’s house with a generator. For them, the outage was not an inconvenience. It was a trap.
The situation on the ground is still unfolding. Power is being restored in phases. Some neighborhoods have lights. Others do not. The heat advisory remains in effect. The humidity does not let up at night.
Beryl is gone. Its damage is not.
