At least six people have died in Texas and one in Louisiana from Hurricane Beryl as a massive cleanup and recovery operation gets underway to reconnect 2.1 million people energy customers who were left without power during the disastrous storm that tore through the region.
A 53-year-old man and a 74-year-old woman were both killed when trees fell on their homes in separate incidents in Harris County, Texas, police said.
Montgomery County Emergency Management confirmed the deaths of three people: a man in his 40s who was struck by a tree while operating a tractor, and two people whose bodies were found in a tent in a wooded area in Magnolia.
Houston police confirmed Monday that Information Security Officer Russell Richardson, 54, “was caught in rising floodwaters and tragically lost his life.”
In Bossier Parish, Louisiana, northeast of Shreveport, Sheriff Julian Whittington said in a statement on Facebook that a woman was killed when a tree fell on her home.
Acting Gov. Dan Patrick said Tuesday he applied for and received a federal emergency declaration through FEMA after speaking with President Joe Biden to assist in the state’s recovery process.
Beryl has since been downgraded to a tropical depression, but more than 25 million people from Arkansas to Michigan were under flood warnings Tuesday morning as the depression moved northeast.
According to the National Weather Service, up to five inches of rain and thunderstorms could fall along the storm’s path. Some thunderstorms will be severe and could produce tornadoes.
There were 110 tornado warnings in effect on Monday, the highest number ever recorded for a day in July, including 67 in Shreveport, Louisiana.
At least six people died in Texas after the storm made landfall Monday as a Category 1 hurricane with sustained winds of 80 mph (130 km/h).
Sarah Glass and her husband were sitting in their living room as the storm passed and the lights went out. He went to check the generator, and she went to find flashlights and candles. Moments later, a huge tree slammed into their home in Wharton, Texas, 60 miles southwest of Houston.
“And when I entered the kitchen, [there was a] “There was a big crash and the ceiling had collapsed,” she told NBC News. “We were in the living room and we left — there was all this wood with nails coming off the ceiling, so we probably would have been killed.”
According to PowerOutage.us, more than 2.1 million customers were without power as of Tuesday afternoon. including 1.7 million customers of CenterPoint Energy, the primary supplier to the Houston region.
The company said it had restored more than 1 million connections in the past 24 hours and expected to restore another million by the end of Wednesday. However, crews are struggling to reach some areas with high water after more than a foot of rain fell in the past 24 hours.
Fallen trees and high winds have knocked down power lines in the greater Houston area, with the impact being greater than expected as the storm changed course slightly, the company said.
“We didn’t really sleep,” Eva Costancio said as she looked at a large tree that had fallen over power lines in her neighborhood in the Houston suburb of Rosenberg. Costancio told The Associated Press that she had been without power for several hours and worried that the food in her refrigerator had spoiled.
“We are struggling to get food and it would be difficult if we lost that food,” she said.
Houston opened cooling centers Tuesday amid a heat warning that predicted a heat index of as high as 105 degrees for parts of Southeast Texas. The National Weather Service office in Houston warned that widespread power and air conditioning outages were creating dangerous conditions for local residents.
Galveston Mayor Craig Brown said Tuesday that there were no deaths or serious injuries from Beryl, but there was extensive structural damage.
On Monday, social media users posted images of torrential rain in Houston, severe thunderstorms in St. Louis, Missouri, and flooding in Bryant, Arkansas.