Millions of residents in some parts of United States of America, USA maybe experiencing difficulties due to outage of electricity when Hurricane Beryl slamming as Category one hit south-east Texas and Louisiana, knocking out power for nearly three million people and killing 8 persons on Monday.
It was gathered that the Hurricane Beryl made landfall in the US near the city of Houston, killing people and knocking out power to millions.
At Harris County, a Houston Police Department employee, Russell Richardson, 54, was said to have drowned after attempting to drive through high water on his way to work, according to Houston police.
Another person died in a house fire that is believed to have been sparked by lightning, Houston’s mayor said, according to BBC report.
BBC added in its report that three people were also killed in Montgomery County. Officials say one man was killed when a tree fell on him while he was driving a tractor, and two homeless people died when a tree fell on their tent, reports KHOU.
Local reports indicated that estimated 2.3 million customers in Texas were without power as of Tuesday morning, with some cuts also reported in Louisiana and Arkansas.
CenterPoint Energy, a Texas-based utility provider, had said it planned to restore power for at least one million customers by the end of Wednesday.
The storm also caused major destruction and at least 10 unverified deaths in the Caribbean.
Officials said seven people died in Texas’s Harris and Montgomery counties, while one more fatality was confirmed in neighbouring Louisiana.”
Beryl hit the southern United States on Monday morning as a category one hurricane, but it has since been downgraded to a tropical depression, according to videos posted online on Tuesday by residents.
Information from Flightware.com indicated that more than 1,100 flights were cancelled at Houston’s main airport on Monday following the slamming of the Hurricane Beryl.
Hurricane Beryl has moved on, but many communities are dealing with damage. The US Coast Guard took this video of flooding around Sargent, Texas, about 50 miles south of Houston.
No power since 24 hrs due to Hurricane beryl and unlikely to be restored until Wednesday evening, a resident stated in a post online.
Close watchers said the Hurricane Beryl lashed Texas with strong winds and heavy rain on Monday as it churned inland, forcing the closure of oil ports, cancellation of hundreds of flights and leaving nearly 2 million homes and businesses without power.
Beryl, the season’s earliest Category 5 hurricane on record, made landfall near the coastal town of Matagorda, Texas, according to Reuters.
SaharaReporters in its reports captured the Hurricane Beryl situation in USA as stated verbatim below:
“The Category 1 storm made landfall on Monday, bringing winds of up to 94 miles per hour that triggered storm surges, toppled trees, and tore roofs off homes.
Hurricane Beryl has claimed at least eight lives, with seven casualties reported in the greater Houston area and one in Louisiana, US.
As the storm moved inland, it spawned tornadoes in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas.
Cleanup efforts are currently underway, and although Beryl has weakened into a low-pressure system, it is expected to bring flash flooding to areas between Arkansas and Illinois on Tuesday and Wednesday as it moves northeastward toward Michigan.
In the Houston area, three people were killed by falling trees, two drowned and one died in a house fire.
Houston Mayor John Whitmire also confirmed a 54-year-old employee of the Houston Police Department drowned while driving into work.
In Louisiana, a 31-year-old woman was killed when a tree fell on her mobile home.
The big effort on Tuesday is to restore power and water to residents.
At 7am, there are still more than 2 million customers without power throughout Texas.
Nearly all of the outages are in southeast Texas where CenterPoint Energy is reporting 1.8 million without power.
CenterPoint says power will be restored to a million of them by the end of tomorrow.
Officials say it will take days to restore power for everyone.
Acting governor, Dan Patrick says the state is sending about 12,000 lineman to the affected areas.
“Be very careful. power lines are down and we are sending crews and addressing it. there is still more flooding. Do not take this storm as it’s passed you now,” said Patrick.
Beryl made landfall at 3:50am Monday as a Category 1 hurricane near Matagorda, Texas, about 100 miles southwest of Houston, with maximum sustained winds of 80 miles per hour.
The storm made landfall twice before reaching Texas.
The storm hit the Windward Islands as a Category 4 hurricane on June 29.
It barely avoided Jamaica and the Cayman Islands before making landfall as a Category 2 hurricane on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
The volunteers with the group Texans on Misison will bring a laundry unit, a chainsaw team and a mobile mass feeding kitchen to the Houston area.
At least 11 people were killed on the way across the Caribbean.
The storm became a tropical storm before re-intensifying in the Gulf of Mexico and becoming a hurricane hours before making landfall in Texas”, SaharaReporters news report ends in quote.
It was gathered that the Port of Corpus Christi was back open by Tuesday morning, but the Houston Ship Channel, a major point for the import and export of crude oil and refined products, remains closed.
Texas state and local officials warned it could take several days to restore power after Beryl came ashore as a Category 1 hurricane.
We learnt that the fast-moving tempest, which unleashed heavy rains that prompted dozens of high-water rescues, threatened to carve a harsh path over several more states in coming days.
In Texas, the Hurricane toppled 10 transmission lines and knocked down trees that took down power lines.
Observers said that within hours, Hurricane Beryl weakened into a tropical storm, far less powerful than the Category 5 behemoth that tore a deadly path of destruction through parts of Mexico and the Caribbean last weekend.
But the winds and rains of the fast-moving storm were still powerful enough to knock down hundreds of trees that had already been teetering in water-saturated earth, and strand dozens of cars on flooded roadways.
As it moved inland, the storm still threatened to spawn tornados.
National Hurricane Center said damaging winds and flash flooding would continue as Beryl pushes inland.
A civilian employee of the Houston Police Department, was said to have been killed when he was trapped in flood waters under a highway overpass, Houston Mayor John Whitmire said.
“We haven’t really slept,” said Eva Costancio as she gazed at a large tree that had fallen across electric lines in her neighborhood in the Houston suburb of Rosenberg. Costancio, 67, said she had already been without power for several hours and worried that food in her refrigerator would be spoiled.
“We are struggling to have food and losing that food would be difficult,” she said.
Houston and Harris County officials said power crews would be sent into the area to restore service as quickly as possible, an urgent priority for homes also left without air conditioning in the middle of summer. Temperatures, which had cooled slightly with the storm, were expected to reach back into the 90s as early as Tuesday. The National Weather Service issued a heat advisory that said the area heat index could reach 105 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Celsius).
The state will be ready to open cooling centers as well as food and water distribution centers, said Nim Kidd, chief of state emergency operations.
Beryl’s rains pounded Houston and other areas of the coast on Monday, reclosing streets in neighborhoods that had already been washed out by previous storms. Television stations on Monday broadcast the dramatic rescue of a man who had climbed to the roof of his pickup truck after it got trapped in fast-flowing waters. Emergency crews used an extension ladder from a fire truck to drop him a life preserver and a tether before moving him to dry land.
Houston officials reported at least 25 water rescues by Monday afternoon, mostly for people with vehicles stuck in floodwaters.
“First responders are putting their lives at risk. That’s what they’re trained for. It’s working,” Houston Mayor John Whitmire said.
Javier Mejia was one of about 20 people who gathered near the pickup truck rescue site to take pictures of other submerged vehicles sitting on the flooded highway.
“If you don’t have a way through, you’re going to get stuck like that,” Mejia said.
Having experienced previous storms in Houston, Mejia stocked up on food and water before Beryl hit, but forgot gas for his portable generator. He planned to spend the day looking for some.
“I don’t want it to go bad,” he said of the food, adding that if he can’t find gas, “We can just fire up the grill.”
Many streets and neighborhoods throughout Houston were littered with fallen branches and other debris. The buzz of chainsaws filled the air Monday afternoon as residents set to work chopping up knocked-down trees and big branches that had blocked streets and sidewalks.
Patrick warned that flooding could last for days as rain continued to fall on already saturated ground.“This is not a one-day event,” he said.
President Joe Biden was getting regular updates on the storm after it made landfall, the White House said. The U.S. Coast Guard and FEMA had prepared search and rescue teams, and FEMA collected bottled water, meals, tarps and electric generators in case they are needed.
Several companies with refineries or industrial plants in the area reported that the power disruptions necessitated the flaring of gases at the facilities.
Marathon Petroleum Corp said it conducted a “safe combustion of excess gases” at its Galveston Bay Refinery in Texas City, but did not provide information on the amount of gas flared or how long it would continue.
Formosa Plastics Corporation and Freeport LNG also reported flaring related to Beryl, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Companies have 24 hours to share emissions data after the flaring stops, a representative from the TCEQ said in an email.
In Louisiana, heavy bands of rain were expected all day Monday and “the risk is going to be for that heavy rainfall and potential for flash flooding,” National Weather Service meteorologist Donald Jones said in a Monday morning Facebook Live briefing.
The weather service in Shreveport issued tornado warnings across northwest Louisiana. The agency confirmed on social media that multiple tornados had been spotted in that corner of the state.
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