HOUSTON – There’s an ongoing joke Texans are well aware of if you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes.
The laughter has since died down because of ongoing severe weather events claiming lives and putting people’s health and well-being at risk.
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In light of Hurricane Beryl, which caught many Houstonians by surprise, one thing for certain: people’s patience is being tested. I’ve been camping out at the news station because I’ve been without power since Tuesday. We were all hands on deck, working 12-hour shifts when Beryl was set to make landfall.
The next morning, many of us had a pitch-black start to our commute. And while progress was made for some CenterPoint Energy customers, millions were left in the dark until Thursday but more than 800,000 (including myself) are still without power. Patience was wearing thin and since CenterPoint launched its restoration map, those of us who could access it haven’t stopped refreshing and wondering when our lights would come back on - or even becoming skeptical of its results.
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Houston hadn’t even fully recovered from the derecho in May, where several people were killed and some folks were still waiting for debris to be cleaned up.
KPRC 2 Investigates Amy Davis spoke with a clinical psychologist, Robert Cuyler a.k.a. Dr. Bob to learn about the emotional toll we’ve been going through, and one thing he said that resonates with me is for some of us with power outages, we know the lights will come back on at some point. It’s just a matter of waiting.
“One thing that’s important to remember is that as horrible as these things are, they are temporary,” Dr. Bob explained. “And it can be really helpful to go back to the last really bad time and to remember there was an endpoint to it and things got back to normal because in the midst of it, it seems like it goes on forever. Particularly if you’re scared, if you’re hot, if you’re edgy, if you’re angry.”
The anticipatory anxiety is certainly something to consider, but It also doesn’t help when local and state lawmakers are pointing fingers at one another on whose to blame for the lack of transparency or recovery efforts not progressing fast enough.
Being the historian I am and lover of the film No Country For Old Men (if you know, you know) I wondered how former leaders would have handled in current times of crises. Especially with dozens of people referencing Ike and Harvey. That’s why I consulted former Harris County Judge and energy & transportation fellow at the Baker Institute at Rice University, Ed Emmett for guidance.
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Without calling out anyone in particular but just acknowledging how Beryl caught everyone off guard, Emmett was speechless by what appears to be a lack of collaboration between leadership; contrary to when he was in office during Ike. This is because it seems that communities, instead of leaders, are the ones having to step in.
“Ike was a storm surge, not a wind storm [like Beryl,] it also had a component where people were without power, though, right? For two to three weeks in the heat of the summer,” he recalled. “It has struck me and I’m trying not to be critical of anybody involved. But immediately after I came, we set up points of distribution of meals ready to eat and that was all staged and it was all ready to go and leave, leaving the utility company aside. That was a government activity that we did.
“And I remember Mayor [Bill] White and I in our parking lot staging 500 trucks a day in and out for pods,” Emmett continued. “I’m not hearing anything about pods. I’m hearing about some volunteer places where you can pick up water or ice. So I have no explanation as to why there’s this huge difference this time. Because if you were without power that means all the food in your refrigerator spoiled. You don’t have any cooling, so I just don’t know why this one is so different.”
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Coming off of covering Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick accusing current Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo of rejecting aid, I was a little nervous about speaking with her predecessor but my conversation with Emmett was a breath of fresh air because he was all about practicality and common-sense, at least that’s the vibe he gave off.
“The county has to be involved in the Harris County Flood Control District,” he explained. “It’s not the City of Houston Flood Control District, and the County is an arm of the State. That’s one thing that county officials tend to forget; they can only do what the state allows them to do. And so if you’re suddenly at war with the State and you’re an arm of that State, how does that work?”
Arguably, the one good thing to come out of these natural disasters is more people are interested in learning and that public engagement could be key in strengthening our resiliency.
“I won’t pretend to say that I know how the electric grid works,” Emmett quipped. “But I think the public needs to become much more aware of what we take for granted; we flip a switch and the lights come on...The public is going to have to get engaged and care just as much about the power grid.”
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“So I think just as we put a lot of attention on [for example,] restructuring the flooding system to avoid flooding,” he added. “The public is going to have to get engaged and care just as much about the power grid. I think that’s the answer.”
Emmett also held out hope that Houstonians would still remember their resiliency by just being kind to their neighbors. And there are kind people out there that KPRC 2 has been trying to show, especially by highlighting how neighborhoods are coming together like in Third Ward that Deven Clarke reported on the day after Beryl made landfall.
“There are good stories out there, and I think those need to be told. And I do think the county, I don’t know how much rain fell. But I do think the County gets some credit for how there wasn’t flooding,” he explained. “Clearly, this wasn’t Tax Day, this wasn’t Memorial Day, and certainly wasn’t Harvey. But still, the floodwaters receded quickly and I think that’s a good thing.”
RELATED: CenterPoint expects 80% of impacted customers to have power restored by Sunday
“So I think there are some positives we can take out of this going forward,” Emmett concluded. “Hopefully, rather than everybody beating up CenterPoint; I’m not their defender, but yeah, they’re here and we have to deal with them. We need to say ‘OK, what do we need to do to make this all work together?’”
As I conclude this story, I’d like to remind the reader I don’t have power at the time of this writing, and I’m going to a relative’s home, who thankfully got their power back. I don’t know when I and the over 800,000 people will emerge from the darkness, but when we do, let’s remind ourselves: the lights will always come back on.