Three days after devastating thunderstorms hit Houston, the nation's fourth-most populous city began to stagger back to its feet Sunday.
Power has been restored to hundreds of thousands of homes, but power remains out in hard-hit areas not far from downtown. Cars crawled through blackened intersections and through neighborhood streets lined with branches and leaves stacked like banks of green-brown snow.
Sunny skies helped dry the sodden city over the weekend, but also created new dangers as temperatures soared to about 90 degrees and were expected to stay that way. More than 350,000 electricity customers in Houston and a vast swath of its northwest suburbs turned off the air conditioning equipment that helps them endure the Gulf Coast heat and started the day without service.
“I can't sleep,” said Dolores Validares, 61, sweat beading her forehead as she watched her grandchildren outside her home in the city's East End.
It became even more suffocating inside. Her food has spoiled and she is having trouble getting her food stamp refund. Instead, she has relied on nearby fast food chains where she can get cheap food and cold air.
“It's fucking hot,” Mayor John Whitmire said at a news conference Sunday night. “It's getting hot as we speak.” He said the city has opened cooling centers and is offering free rides for residents to get there.
Local power company CenterPoint Energy is working hard to repair power lines that were knocked down by winds or the weight of trees, and said it had repaired more than 500,000 customers within 48 hours of the storm. Announced. Thursday evening. 250,000 cases were revised between Saturday and Sunday.
The outage was so widespread that even the company's own online outage tracker, which Houstonians often use to check on service, became so taxed that it stopped working reliably.
A company spokesperson said CenterPoint is sending about 7,000 workers to make repairs, including thousands of additional power line workers brought in from surrounding areas and “vegetation control personnel.” ” is also included.
The company expected service to be restored to 80% of affected customers by Sunday evening. However, around 200,000 people are likely to remain without service until the beginning of the week. Some areas may experience power outages until the end of the day Wednesday, the company said.
In other parts of the city, where power was not out or was quickly restored, daily life continued uninterrupted Sunday. The church bell rang. At Hermann Park in downtown Houston, golfers and joggers sweated out their homes believing they had air conditioning. Expedition sports teams gathered for a game.
Parents anxiously awaited updates on their children's schools in the city and surrounding suburbs. Most of the Houston Independent School District's 274 schools, which were closed Friday, were without power and were scheduled to reopen Monday. However, dozens of homes remained without electricity.
“I have no idea what Monday is going to be like,” said Clinton Ogden, whose 8-year-old daughter attends school across the street from her home at Sinclair Elementary School in the Timbergrove neighborhood northwest of downtown. The school campus suffered extensive damage from falling trees, and much of the area remained without power.
Both he and his wife work, so it would be difficult if the school didn't open. “She's going to have to come with me,” Ogden, who works in construction sales, said of his daughter.
More than 150,000 students in two other local public school districts, Cypress-Fairbanks and Spring Branch, will remain out of school Monday, officials said.
Along Interstate 10, utility trucks could be seen congregating in mass retailer parking lots ahead of the rollout. In hard-hit areas, the sound of chainsaws echoed along with the roar of diesel generators powering the homes of those lucky enough to own one.
“There are a lot of areas within probably a two-mile radius that had power restored as of yesterday,” said Dwayne Williams, 43, who lives with his family in Cypress, Texas, northwest of Houston. “But we don't have anything yet.”
With the sun beating down on her, Williams said the temperature inside her home felt above 90 degrees. He had a generator to keep the refrigerator running and the occasional fan.
The National Weather Service said Thursday that thunderstorms battered the metropolitan area and a tornado briefly touched down near the Cypress area.
Williams said a large power tower collapsed in the area. The fences on both sides of his home fell down, and trees in the neighborhood also fell.
Traces of the storm's power were still everywhere. A crane lifted up a fallen signboard at a commercial facility. And new scars remain on downtown Houston's high-rise buildings, with windows blown out and parts of the top floors boarded up. Whitmire said a six-block area of downtown and some office towers remains barricaded.
Thursday's thunderstorm, which officials said killed seven people, struck with such sudden force that people in the Houston area had little time to prepare. Heat poses a more predictable threat, but as of Sunday there had been only 18 heat-related emergency calls, said Samuel Peña, the city's fire chief.
In addition to opening city and county cooling centers, Houston schools plan to distribute food starting Monday, officials said.
A 100-year-old tree fell and tore off its base in Maria Saldana's Spring Branch garden. No one was hurt. But as of Sunday, no one nearby was without power, and maps published by the utility company showed that neighbors feared power would not be restored for several more days.
Saldana, 64, was outraged by the fourth consecutive power outage, following Hurricane Ike in 2008, Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and the winter freeze of 2021.
“I've lived in this house for 38 years,” she said. “I'm old. I don't want to do it anymore.”
She said she was considering moving, but wasn't sure where. For now, she said, she takes cold showers and drives around the block where the cold air blows.
Thankfully, she said, “There's water.”
colbi edmonds I contributed a report from New York.