HOUSTON — More than 1.3 million customers in Texas were still without power Wednesday night, depriving many of air conditioning during a dangerous heat wave, two days after Hurricane Beryl made landfall on the Gulf Coast.
The storm, which is blamed in at least 11 deaths in the U.S. and nine in the Caribbean, was a post-tropical cyclone Wednesday and was still bringing rain to the Great Lakes and New England regions through Wednesday night, forecasters said.
The Houston area was under a heat advisory though Thursday, with the heat index — a measure of how hot it feels when humidity is taken into account — predicted to be in the 100-degree range.
"This heat is especially dangerous if you remain without power and doing strenuous outdoor work. Please stay hydrated and use safe generator practices," the National Weather Service in Houston said.
It felt like 102 degrees in Houston at around noon Wednesday, according to the weather service.
Melissa Hunziker, of Houston, is just about coping in the heat with no power: "Our house is actually pretty cool right now, but we know that will change quickly ahead."
"We’ve got a portable fan that is chargeable-battery-operated. So that helped last night, but we won’t probably stay another night," she said.
It's not just the power shortage but also the loss of cellphone connectivity that is hard to deal with, making emergency information hard to get, Hunziker said.
Kassie Rieger and Keaton Cravens were out in Houston to offer help to those in need. “We just hope people are staying safe and doing what they can to help their neighbors," Rieger told NBC News.
CenterPoint Energy, the main supplier for the greater Houston area, said in a statement Wednesday that it had restored power to more than 1 million of the 2.26 million customers affected since Beryl arrived.
"We’re holding CenterPoint accountable," Mayor John Whitmire said at a news conference Wednesday. "CenterPoint’s going to have to do a better job."
The city has opened ice and water distribution centers and cooling centers. Whitmire said that with traffic lights out across the city, drivers should stay home after dark if possible.
It could be days before power is restored to some areas, CenterPoint said.
More than 980,000 of Harris County's 2.1 million customers were without power at 4 p.m. Wednesday, the company's online tracker showed. The main elements of CenterPoint's energy system remain intact, the company said, including its transmission towers and substations.
Around 1.3 million customers, including those not serviced by CenterPoint, were without power Wednesday night, according to outage tracker poweroutage.us.
“We take our responsibility of serving our customers and working as safely and as quickly as possible to restore service very seriously,” Lynnae Wilson, CenterPoint’s senior vice president for electric business, said in a statement. “At the same time, we fully understand our customers are hot and growing more impatient with their outages.”
With power outages comes another risk: carbon monoxide poisoning from generators.
"We've seen over 200 carbon-monoxide poisoning calls in the last 24 hours," Houston Fire Chief Sam Peña said Wednesday.
Generators should never be used indoors, Peña said. "Don't have them anywhere near your home, anywhere near an opening or a door," he said. People are also running cars inside garages to charge electronics, and the exhaust can quickly overwhelm a family and kill them, he said.
Now a post-tropical cyclone, Beryl was around 80 miles west of Buffalo, New York, at around 11 p.m., and it was moving east-northeast at 20 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.
Around 2 to 4 inches of rain could fall in parts of the eastern Great Lakes region and in New England overnight into Thursday, it said.
At least 11 people in the U.S. have died since Beryl made landfall Monday, many of them from trees falling onto their homes, amid widespread flooding and disruption.
Ten of the deaths were in Texas, and one was in Louisiana, officials said.
Of the people who died in Texas, five were in Harris County, the county where Houston is, according to an NBC News count of official reports. Two deaths in Texas, which were in Harris County, were from carbon monoxide poisoning.
The city of Houston reported an ambulance shortage, Nim Kidd, the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said at the news conference. The agency sent in 25 additional ambulances to help with 911 calls, and overnight it sent additional paramedics to hospital emergency rooms.
The Houston Airport System also said Wednesday it was dealing with runway repairs and limited staffing in the wake of Beryl — amid a busy summer travel season.
“Our hearts grieve for all Texans impacted by Hurricane Beryl, including our fellow Texans who tragically lost their lives or were injured,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who is overseas on an economic development mission to Asia, said in a statement Tuesday.
"We also will continue to stay in contact with electrical providers about the necessity to quickly restore power," he added.
President Joe Biden has issued a federal major disaster declaration, which will reimburse up to 75% of the costs for debris clearance and other emergency measures.
"We will be with the people of Texas for as long as it takes to recover," Biden said in a statement.
