CLIMATEWIRE | HOUSTON — At first, Annette Villeda tried to wait out the heat.
Hurricane Beryl had knocked out her power, along with 2 million other residents of southeast Texas. Which meant no lights, no electricity and, worst of all, no air conditioning.
But when hours without cool air turned into days, Villeda decided to ditch her sweltering home and seek refuge down the street. There — in the parking lot of a community center that also was without power — aid workers had set up a temporary shelter with both electricity and air conditioning.
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“I just can’t thank them enough,” Villeda said as she cooled off last Saturday, surrounded by the portable fans and lanterns she had brought to recharge. “Because where else do you go?”
The emergency cooling station, and others like it, brought short-term relief to Villeda and her neighbors. But scientists and health experts say it’s a temporary fix to a problem that’s getting worse with each passing year.
Hurricanes and heat waves are both intensifying because of climate change. And together, the combination is squeezing the poor, sick and vulnerable.
What Houston faced last week is part of this new reality. A hurricane or storm will roar through and knock the grid offline. Then a heat wave will follow in its wake, suffocating — and sometimes killing — those without the means to adapt.
It’s happened time and again.
After Hurricane Laura hit Louisiana in 2020 — knocking out power to 600,000 customers — eight of the 27 deaths attributable to the storm were because of heat, according to the state health department.
It was a similar story for Hurricane Ida in 2021. More than 1 million customers lost power because of the storm, and the Louisiana Department of Health said 10 people died because of heat in the days that followed — more than any other single cause related to the hurricane.
That pattern is now playing out in Texas. Heat-related hospitalizations spiked after Beryl struck the Gulf Coast on July 8, and at least three people have died from the high temperatures.
It’s a phenomenon known as a compound disaster — when multiple extreme weather events collide at once.
Research suggests that compound disasters will become more frequent as the climate warms, raising the risks to human health. And it's not limited to hurricanes and heat. Overlapping disasters of all kinds — from wildfires and floods to storms and droughts — are expected to worsen in the coming decades.
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on climate science, has said the risk of compound events worldwide likely has risen already because of global warming. And it will continue to increase as global temperatures rise.
What Houston faced this month — the one-two punch of a tropical cyclone and extreme heat — is of particular worry. Research warns that millions more people worldwide could face these conditions if the world warms by just a few more fractions of a degree.
That means cities like Houston have a lot of preparing to do.
Beryl showed the city's electric grid is vulnerable to extreme weather events, experts say. And generators are in short supply, too.
That's a problem because many of Houston’s community centers and libraries — which also function as neighborhood cooling centers — had no power or backup generators in the days following Beryl. The situation forced residents to stay home or travel elsewhere for relief.
For Villeda, who had access to a car and her neighborhood charging station, the situation was uncomfortable — but she said it could have been worse. She worries about people who are more vulnerable to the heat, including those without homes.
“You worry about people that live outside [or] people that live inside and they don’t have the money to pay the air conditioning to run 24/7,” she said.
‘We can’t catch a break’
It didn't take long for Houston to bake after Beryl left town.
The day after the storm hit, temperatures climbed into the mid-90s, and the heat index rose above 100 degrees.
Hospitals quickly found themselves overwhelmed. Emergency rooms were filled with people suffering from heat-related illnesses, carbon monoxide poisoning from generators or other storm-related afflictions.
Many patients living without power could not be safely discharged to their homes, resulting in a shortage of hospital beds.
“We always expect a high increase in volume in the days following a storm,” said Carrie Bakunas, medical director of the emergency department at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center.
The Texas Division of Emergency Management eventually opened an emergency shelter in Houston’s NRG Arena to help alleviate the backup at city hospitals.
Community organizations mobilized, too, distributing food, water, ice and other emergency supplies. And Houston’s Office of Emergency Management published daily lists of open cooling centers across the city.
But for days after Beryl struck, there were fewer air-conditioned sites available than usual. Many of Houston’s libraries and community centers, which do double duty as cooling centers, also lost power. And many had no access to backup generators.
As Villeda rested last Saturday inside the temporary cooling shelter near her home, the community center next door was still without electricity.
It’s one of 10 community centers serving Harris County Precinct 2, which includes swaths of north and east Houston. Only three have a backup generator.
Officials there are working to address that issue, said Scott Spiegel, a senior adviser to Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia.
The precinct has put out a request for proposals for a project that would supply every one of its facilities — including all 10 community centers — with backup power. But it could take years to complete.
“It does kind of feel like we can’t catch a break," he said of recent extreme weather events. "It would be a much better situation for everyone if we had a better focus on resiliency.”
Representatives from other Harris County precincts confirmed that only some of their community centers are equipped with backup power. None of the city’s library locations have backup supplies. And only one of the city of Houston’s 13 multiservice centers has a permanent generator.
Outside Houston, cooling centers in nearby communities faced similar challenges.
The town of Lake Jackson, in neighboring Brazoria County, typically opens its air-conditioned civic center to the public during heat waves.
But Beryl caused extensive water damage to the building, which lost power for days afterward. By the time the lights came back on — days later — the heat had caused mold to spread inside.
Community members were directed instead to the local recreation center to escape the heat.
After also losing power for two days, the local rec center was back on the grid and open to the public July 10. Inside, staff members stocked tables with water, snacks and other emergency supplies and set up a charging station in the hallway.
But the weather wasn’t finished with Lake Jackson yet.
On July 12, just two days after the center was up and running again, a thunderstorm ripped through town and damaged a transformer, knocking out the rec center’s power for the second time that week.
Luckily, the problem was fixed much faster the second time around — power was restored before noon, and the facility was able to reopen by 12:30 p.m.
“But it definitely disrupted the cooling center,” said Reyes Cardenas, a rec center staff member. “Normally we would open at 9 [a.m.], but because of that, we couldn’t let people in.”
Policy decisions matter, too
Compound disasters such as hurricanes and heat waves are increasingly testing Texas and other states along the Gulf of Mexico, said Jennifer Trivedi, an expert on disaster vulnerability at the University of Delaware.
Her research helped inform a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which found that overlapping disasters threaten the Gulf region with a cycle of “perpetual disaster recovery” — making communities vulnerable to worse outcomes with every subsequent event.
But human elements play a big part in multilayered disasters as well.
“There’s a phrase people use: ‘There's’ no such thing as a natural disaster,’” Trivedi said. “Really what we mean by that is there is always some sort of human intervention, human decision-making, human structures that are shaping the systems that really ramp a hazard into a disaster.”
CenterPoint Energy, Houston’s main electric utility company, has faced intense scrutiny in Beryl’s aftermath. As of Thursday afternoon, more than 10,000 people in Southeast Texas were still waiting for their power to be restored.
The Texas Public Utility Commission launched an investigation into the company’s disaster response earlier this week, after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) criticized CenterPoint’s “repeated failure to provide power.” The commission is expected to complete a report by December with recommendations for improvement.
Other recent disasters, like the freeze of 2021, have exposed vulnerabilities in the Texas grid as a whole. Largely isolated from the rest of the country, it’s difficult for Texas to draw emergency power from neighboring grids when disasters strike.
At the same time, experts say equitable citywide access to cooling centers and other emergency resources is crucial for protecting vulnerable populations when the lights do go out. And, in the long term, building up climate resilience in socially vulnerable communities is key to better outcomes when disasters strike.
“It really is an equity question,” Trivedi said. “That’s something that has to be part of these conversations.”
Research has found that neighborhoods in the same city often experience wildly different temperatures throughout the day, influenced by density, building materials and access to green space. Low-income families and people of color often live in the hottest neighborhoods.
Texas is no exception. A 2020 heat-mapping project in Houston revealed large disparities in neighborhood temperatures across the city. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which ranks U.S. neighborhoods according to their heat risks, also has found that some Houston ZIP codes are more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme temperatures than others.
As repeated disasters wallop the Gulf Coast, socially vulnerable populations face a tough time rebuilding and recovering — often with little time to recover in between extreme weather events.
These communities need social support no matter the circumstances, said Sherea McKenzie, executive director of Julia C. Hester House community center in Houston’s 5th Ward.
“But when there is a weather event, it’s exacerbated,” she said.
McKenzie herself was still without power last weekend. She’d been able to catch a few days’ relief at a hotel — but many of her fellow community members had nowhere else to go, she said.
Many are underinsured. Some must contend with language barriers when requesting disaster assistance. And some households were still behind on repairs from previous weather extremes, such as a series of windstorms that swept the city in May.
“It’s the multiple layers that you're dealing with that make things even more distressful,” McKenzie said. “It’s those layers, and it’s anticipating when people are in need.”
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.