Beryl In Houston Was The Beta Test For A Disaster No American City Is Ready For - No Power, No Water, Lethal Heat [View all]

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For days, residents of Houston struggled to survive as temperatures rose. They shared generators, filled buckets and bathtubs with ice, packed air-conditioned hotels and emergency rooms. The most vulnerable struggled to get the care they needed. Many died. But in some ways, Houston was narrowly spared. Temperatures rose to the high 90s, but only for a couple of days. If the heat had stayed, the human toll could have been far worse.

Experts warn this type of catastrophe — a combined power outage with a heat wave — is a scenario that cities and states are unprepared for. “I don’t think it’s likely — I think it’s an absolute certainty,” said Brian Stone, a professor and director of the Urban Climate Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “I think it’s an absolute certainty that we will have an extreme heat wave and an extended blackout in the United States.”

The Washington Post analyzed the risks of a prolonged, citywide blackout coinciding with a more severe heat wave. The results show that such a heat wave could kill between 600 and 1,500 people in the Houston metro area over five days. With the power grid working normally, the same heat wave would lead to around 50 deaths. To estimate the number of deaths, The Post created a statistical model that follows a peer-reviewed study from 2023 with some simplifying assumptions. The analysis incorporates detailed models of how indoor heat exposure would rise in a blackout, developed by Amir Baniassadi, an expert on environmental health and indoor heat at Harvard Medical School.

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When a power outage hits a city, some services immediately disappear. After Hurricane Beryl, stoplights ceased working; some gas stations, which provided critical services to anyone running a generator, lost power themselves and closed. Cell towers not equipped with their own backup power went down, severing thousands of people from communication with the outside world. At the same time, experts say, the population instantly becomes divided: Those with power — or the money and means to get it — and those without. Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University who wrote a book about the 1995 Chicago heat wave, says that for a brief time there will be a flurry of activity. People will socialize in the streets and then hunt for supplies: nonperishable groceries, gas to run their cars, ice to cool off.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2024/hurricanes-power-outages-heat-wave-risk/?itid=sf_climate_climate_climate-front-top-table_p001_f002