According to NASA EarthData, “2.3 million utility customers of CenterPoint Energy (out of 2.6 million total customers) lost power during the storm [Hurricane Beryl]. Electricity was restored to about 1.1 million customers by the night of July 10. As of Thursday, July 11, more than 1 million utility customers were still without power across Houston.” At the time of this writing on July 14th, over half a million homes and businesses still lacked power.
Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane. This was a weak storm, as hurricanes go, only an echo of its former Category 5 glory days in the Caribbean islands. So what happened? Why, in possibly the world capital of the energy industry, did CenterPoint fail so spectacularly? And is this an outlier or an omen?
To answer that, consider the high probability of storm repetition. This is early in the hurricane season; Beryl is only the second named hurricane. (Beryl is also the earliest Category 5 on record.) The Atlantic still has months of storm activity to come, with peak energy around the second week of September. At this point in the year, we can expect stronger and stronger storms for weeks, and Houston is on the usual path for most Atlantic storms for most of the season. Another hurricane is only too likely.
Now consider Houston’s recent record. While this is only the second named Atlantic hurricane, this is already the third catastrophic failure of the grid in Houston this year. The CenterPoint failure last week is part of a disturbing trend. Two storms in May cut power to hundreds of thousands of customers. The first, an early season derecho, knocked transmission lines down like so many dominoes and knocked out electricity for almost a million accounts. The second was “just a thunderstorm” in the age of apocalyptic average. It cut power to over three hundred thousand. Both May storms were followed by days with no restoration of service.
Both May storms also came with temperatures into the 90s (°F), high humidity, and lows never dropping below 70° at night. The air was so saturated with insulating moisture, that twice in May the overnight low was higher than the daytime high. Since May, Houston has rarely seen temperatures drop below 80°F even overnight. Though not lethal by itself, relentless heat like this compromises the body’s ability to rest and to heal itself. It is stressful, physically and emotionally. Given any underlying medical conditions, heat becomes deadly.
So in weather like this, air conditioning becomes essential for many people. Those who live in apartments with little air circulation, those who have heart problems or uncontrolled hypertension, those who work outside and need recovery time in the evenings, the list of dangerous conditions that require cooling is long. But on July 10th, the vast majority of CenterPoint customers had no air conditioning. This was coupled with weather that made simply opening the windows dangerous, adding to the list of those who needed indoor climate control.
The death toll from Beryl is at 13, with an accurate count not expected for weeks to come primarily because there are many indirect causes that are better correlated to being without power than to the hurricane itself. Thus far, few deaths from the outages have been attributed to Beryl. In addition to heat-related illnesses, many who rely on dialysis pumps, oxygen tanks, or refrigeration for daily medications like insulin have been hospitalized. Some have died, and it is likely that there are many more unreported deaths tied to the power outages.
There is also the specter of water-born disease looming. On July 6th, Houston Public Works told its customers to prepare for lower lake levels due to the ongoing drought and exacerbating heat. Then on the 9th, 11th and 12th, the public utility released waste-water contamination alerts for two of the lakes that feed into the water supply and a generalized spill into the storm drain system. The lowered lake levels from the days leading up to the storm increased the concentration of any waste spills. Those who have wells in the area were urged to have their water tested and disinfected (which raises questions on the depth of those wells). Those who used the public water system were initially told that the July 9th spill would not result in water contamination. However by the 10th more than 50 boil water notices had been issued for Harris County, which includes all of Houston and several surrounding communities.
Compounding the stresses from high winds and storm flows beyond system capacity, Houston Public Works also lost power. Two of the spills cited above were due to power failure, and many of the boil water notices list power loss as a factor. When power goes down at the water treatment facility, there is no treatment. Pumps stop working, most of the automated chemical treatment streams are shut down, and testing is manual and ad hoc, reminding us that it is dangerous to work for any public utility in a storm. At the customer level, the situation was dire for those without power. Households faced the choice between buying distilled water or taking a chance on infection. For many in the immediate aftermath of the storm, there was no safe route to drive in order to go buy water.
Houston native, Andrea Valdez, writes in The Atlantic that “Houstonians are, sadly, old hands at this. Lots of people have invested in generators—which have basically become an essential household appliance—to power things like fridges and fans and portable AC units.” She goes on to note that while many now have generators, few have capacity to run for days at a time. The gasoline that fuels most household generators is pump dependent and therefore power dependent. When the pumps go down, there is no refill for the generator. And at gas stations that manage to keep the power on and the pumps running, the lines at the pump run long, with hours of waiting in the heat. Valdez claims that upon driving into Houston on Tuesday, she stopped at a service plaza about 25 miles outside the city limits to refill her tank and found a traffic jam. Every pump in the huge plaza was taken and drivers were circling to be next in line. Valdez notes that there were many more people packed into the plaza’s building, presumably to get things like water and pre-packaged food, but also just to find a bit of respite from the heat in the plaza’s functioning air conditioning. Most of these people had driven 25 miles out of the city in order to get gasoline and essentials because there were no closer options. Now, imagine all those tens of thousands who didn’t have reliable and safe transport to travel those 25 miles.
Most emergency services and many other essential businesses stock their own water and fuel supplies, but every underground tank is dependent upon electricity. When the power goes down and the pumps stop running, then first responders, utility repair trucks, communications and news organizations, and many others are all grounded. Hospitals have many back-ups for their energy systems, but they are often dependent on daily deliveries of fuel — and few hospitals have their own water supply. Assisted living centers, filled with a community’s most fragile people, are fortunate if they have a properly sized generator, while their water supply is all pumped. When the pumps go down in a modern urban environment, lives are threatened. And this is just one facet of the power outage debacle, which can include everything from food spoilage and lost business revenues to nuclear facility meltdowns.
As most of you know, Beryl did not stop at Houston. The storm, downgraded to a tropical depression, barreled through the middle of the US, followed the Ohio River Valley north to New England, and then finally dissipated off the Maine coast — where the Bangor Daily News was alerting potato growers to be aware of the potential for a storm-borne late blight outbreak (which was concerning as the storm was raining on my potatoes too). Paducah County in southern Indiana experienced a cluster of some of the strongest tornados on their record books. The cluster itself —seven confirmed tornados — set the record for the most tornados in a single day in that county. Upstate New York saw landslides and barn-razing tornados. North County, New Hampshire experienced widespread catastrophic flooding, and many homes in the coastal community of Hampton, NH, are now islands.
But the winner of the Beryl oppression award goes to Vermont, not necessarily because this state experienced the worst damage (though it may be the most extensive), but because the remnants of Beryl parked over the center of the state for nearly twelve hours, spreading chaos in exactly the same place and exactly one year to the day — almost to the hour — from the catastrophic floods of July 2023. It is hard to overstate the shock that many Vermonters are feeling. Towns and neighborhoods that had barely closed the books on recovery — or hadn’t — were again waking on July 11th to devastation. Some that had escaped last year were not so lucky this year. Montpelier remains the one place that did not see a repeat on the scale of last year, though it was not unscathed, with washed out roads and bridges and some downtown businesses once again closed for repairs.
Some intersections in Barre, VT, looked exactly the same in July 2024 as they did in July 2023.
There was less water this year, but far more mud, likely because 2023 flooding exposed many Vermont hillsides that have yet to recover their anchoring plant-life. So there was more exposed mud to wash downslope in this year’s deluge. As an example, last year a landslide opened up a 30 foot wide swath of brown down a 100 foot bank along the road I drive to work, the main route to get to the highway. It was seeded with grass last fall and, with the green surface color, had blended back into the mountainside. Grass roots are shallow, though, and now the exposed rock and soil are once again cutting an attention-grabbing brown gash that filled up the culvert along the side of the road and probably contributed to the flooding on the lower reaches of that road. A more dire example is this landslide that is likely beyond geophysical remediation. The slump has been inching toward Highway 2 for a year, and any plant life that had taken root is now washed away again. There is talk of closing the stretch of road alongside the river and rerouting traffic because that portion of the road will be lost to the river sooner or later.
One biblical flood is bad fortune. Two seems a bit more like a vendetta. But two in exactly the same location, exactly a year apart begins to feel like the gods are either playing a cruel joke or desperately trying to send a message. What is that message? Perhaps that we are out of time to prepare for atmospheric change. It is here and now.
But, let me repeat, this was a mild hurricane. It was mild relative to other hurricanes, but it was also mild relative to many recent land-based storms that lacked hurricane classification. This storm dropped far less rain on Houston than Harvey did, partly because Beryl moved out of the region faster but also because it wasn’t carrying as much of the Gulf of Mexico in its clouds. The remnants of Beryl caused tornados in Vermont, which is strange in a mountainous land, but even stranger are the many stronger and more destructive tornados we’ve experienced this year without Beryl’s assistance. And then there was also disastrous coterminous weather, unrelated to Beryl, but just as damaging, like the rain bomb in Minneapolis and the furnace-blast heat all across the Western US.
My point is that the unusual level of destruction in Houston is not the result of unusual weather. Unusual weather is, unfortunately, not uncommon now, but it also doesn’t commonly cause devastation on the scale seen in Houston. Even with all our mud, Vermont is mostly back to what passes for normal these days (Plainfield notwithstanding). For comparison, there were no waste water spills, and my town’s boil-water notice was more for the sake of good form than necessity, lasting only a day and a half while officials thoroughly tested the waters. There were downed power lines and uprooted trees and washed out roads, but most communities lacked power for only a few hours and mostly overnight. In my town there were railroad ties deposited in roadway median grass half a mile from the riverside tracks, and a few houses moved many yards down from their foundations (yards as in “plots of land” for some), but only two people died in the whole state — and one of them died in the course of doing his public works job. Nobody died because their oxygen tank stopped working.
Note the difference in quality of flood effects between Vermont and Houston. In Houston, there was widespread flooding which, of course, stranded vehicles and left an unholy mess behind. Trees seem to have caused the most destruction. But there are few stories or images of destroyed buildings, and, with the lack of topography, there is almost nothing of homes ripped off their foundations and roads washing away. The destruction in Vermont — where mountains and gravity often cause difficulties — is not merely water in the road and power outages. It truly ranks as annihilation. I know of one musician here in Vermont who recovered nothing of his small home except a silt-filled mandolin. (Later, others apparently found two of his guitars.) Yet, in Houston, thirteen are confirmed dead, with that number expected to rise with more accurate accounting, whereas in Vermont we lost far more physical infrastructure and only two people.
So what happened in Houston? Andrea Valdez writes “Moderate storms like Beryl are concerning because they reveal just how fragile Houston’s power infrastructure has become.” She also says that lifelong and formerly dedicated Houstonians are starting to talk about leaving, and leaving before their city is so degraded that property values plunge to nothing, leaving them metaphorically and possibly physically underwater.
I know how they feel. While Albuquerque is not as fragile as Houston, it is under tremendous strain. There is not enough water to support the population, full stop. City and state officials have been buying rights to the Colorado River and pumping far more water from the Rio Grande than is legal under current treaty provisions. But there has not been one year of at least “average” monsoonal rainfall since 2018, and that year’s total precipitation still fell short of the city’s normal 11 inches. (The last significant city-wide flood was in 1941.) Wells are drying and, where they are still productive, they are becoming increasingly concentrated in heavy-metals and other naturally occurring toxins. Ten years ago, I made the decision to close my bookstore and move rather than risk being stranded in a house that was unsellable in a climate that is particularly unforgiving to old age, with both deadly cold and deadly heat — sometimes in the same day. (Joking. Sort of.)
But this is not fragility. Albuquerque is fairly resilient for all the pressures that are on the region. Communities are strong and supportive. There are many ways to get food and increasingly many ways to harvest and re-use water. Bike trails and horse trails are ubiquitous, well-maintained and in use constantly for daily travel, and so travel is not curtailed by weather (though people do tend to stay home in inclement conditions). Everybody has at least a fireplace capable of heating the home, many dominantly use wood heat, and most people have a generator, many of which are veg oil powered. Air conditioning is not great. In fact, it sucks at the best of times, coming as it does from evaporative cooling. But it uses so little energy that a small generator can keep it running if the power goes down in a deadly heatwave (like June 2024). The power does not go down as often though, because the grid was installed late in the 20th century and most transmission lines are underground. (Of course, there are also fewer trees to fall on things in the high desert.) In addition to the relatively stable grid power, most people have roof-top solar panels, for electricity and heat, and many wells are pumped by private wind turbines. For most needs, loss of one source means New Mexicans just switch to another.
Furthermore, people tend to have ways of meeting their needs that don’t require wages. (New Mexicans are notorious for earning “just enough” at a job and then disappearing.) So when it is impossible to get to work, it is not impossible to eat and keep the generator running. A hurricane in Albuquerque might actually be a reason to celebrate. It certainly wouldn’t cause widespread devastation that lasts for a week or more. However, for Albuquerqueans, a week with no grid is not devastation, nor is it unusual for people to voluntarily put life on hold for a week or more. A hurricane would just be another excuse to do nothing, Albuquerque’s favorite pastime. And it must be said, it is hard to perturb a place where nothing much happens but daily living.
So, again, what is up with Houston? What are the lessons learned? What makes Albuquerque and Vermont more resilient than Houston? Common wisdom would dictate that the community with greater resources would be better able to respond to stresses. Why does Houston’s wealth not insulate it from disaster, nor even allow the city flexibility in response?
There are many reasons. But first, the city is falling apart. For most cities under neoliberal sway, shrinking tax bases, increasing costs, and privatization have eroded investment in infrastructure in the name of cutting costs and increasing shareholder returns, and now the physical basis of life in an average city is crumbling. Repairs have not been made. Renovations are rare. Adaptations to new conditions are nearly unknown. In this milieu, any new strain to a city will quickly turn disastrous. Even with resources at hand, it is too late to address the problem when the storm is approaching. You can’t make up for decades of neglect in the hurried hours before landfall. If you don’t prepare — with regular maintenance and adjustment — then you won’t be prepared (which is just too simple an equation for so many to get so wrong). If your culvert system is outdated and in need of dredging, there will be flooding and violent erosion. If your power transmission lines are poorly maintained and surrounded by vegetation, particularly trees that are already stressed by drought and therefore more prone to breakage, then you will lose transmission when the winds start. All the utility repair trucks in the city won’t be able to keep up with the cascading breakdown.
That points up the second problem in relying upon wealth to buy emergency responses. In an emergency, you won’t have all the repair trucks. You may not have even 10% of your repair force. Roads are flooded and closed. People are stranded wherever they happened to be when the storm hit, including evacuation to a distant location. And when the storm is over, there is no guarantee that there will be gasoline to move those repair trucks to where they are needed. In an emergency, people must be focused on surviving the emergency. This means staying in a safe place and attending to loved ones. It might mean recovering from injuries and damages related to the emergency. Most first responders and other emergency response workers are dedicated to their jobs and will get to work if it is at all possible, but the nature of an emergency is that it is often not possible, not through choice, but in actuality. They can’t get to work. In an emergency, public utility crews are going to be reduced directly in proportion to the magnitude of the emergency. So if a city’s infrastructure has weaknesses that will break in a storm, there may not be anybody to address a breakdown until it has spiraled out of control.
This speaks to an underlying irrationality in the modern system. Our culture assumes that money can always be traded for real value in labor and resources, that these real world assets are as fluid and flexible in distribution as digital dollars. But money does not make those assets appear nor ensure that they will be available when necessary. When pumps go down, there is no gasoline regardless of your capacity to pay. When people are sick or injured or huddling in a secure place waiting out a storm, no amount of money can get them to where the work needs to be done. And penalizing your employees because they can’t show up in times of stress does not get the work done. To the contrary, you will probably lose skilled employees.
When there is a drought, the water utility can do nothing to increase the supply. When floodwaters and power outages cause mass food spoilage, there is no restocking until the roads are open — at the earliest. Until then, even the wealthy will go hungry. Despite our stubborn delusions, money does not equal real world value. Money merely carries the possibility of being redeemed for real things. When those things are not available, then money is worthless. Emergencies always reveal how bankrupt monetary wealth is in the real world. Money can’t buy what isn’t available, and an emergency is defined by unavailability.
Of course, this has implications for our expectations that somebody will address all these problems with technology that does not yet exist. If it doesn’t exist now, it probably is not going to exist. As a culture we are at landfall in the storm of climate change. If we haven’t made preparations and scaled them to work, then no amount of money will make up for our improvidence now that the storm is upon us. We are all Houston and the power is down.
We keep talking about climate change and other forms of biophysical and social collapse in the future tense. This will happen by 2050; that will happen by 2080; this dire thing will take two to three centuries to unfold. But collapse is here and now. The damage is here and now. It is Houston and Vermont after Beryl. It is perpetual Canadian fires. It is deforestation and depleted aquifers and Donald Trump. We talk about the changes yet to come because that makes us feel that we still have time to prepare. We’ve got decades; we don’t have to do anything right now. And so nothing is done. We have not yet even begun to adapt our infrastructure and systems to this climate that is rolling over us, and now we are out of time. We are all Houston and the power is down.
It is too late to renovate and adapt many things in this culture. Now is the time to pull out the lifeboats and consider what we can’t live without, knowing that the more we toss in the boat, the more likely we will sink. What will you take in your boat?
I made the decision to move ten years ago. I considered many regions, ruling out places that were geophysically fragile. No coastal regions, particularly along the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. No fire-prone properties. I sought a location that was behind the warming trend, somewhere formerly cold that would be tolerably warm for at least a few more decades. Of course, water was important, and not only a continued supply, but clean and likely to stay that way. I also thought about infrastructure, though at the time there was less information on the neoliberal decay that has been eating away at assets both real and monetary since the 1980s. For example, I did not learn, until after the relocation, that 12% of bridges in Massachusetts are considered unsafe and yet still in use.
I wanted a home with redundancy, more than one way to meet each need. I wanted to continue growing some of my own food and to be living near others who were producing what I could not. And I wanted many options for cooking and storing food. In addition to the public water system, I wanted a well or some onsite water supply. As it was clear that the move would be to a climate with winter, heating was a big consideration. I wanted an older home that was designed to channel heat upwards, that came with masonry that served as thermal mass, that had wood-burning stoves in place and in use. And there needed to be fuel for those fires. I intended to add solar heating panels and insulation to this suite of heating solutions. I also had thoughts of solar PV panels and heat pumps, but those hopes were quashed when I learned that most older homes with low-tech tools and systems were not equipped with sufficient electrical capacity to run a heat pump — and the solar electric panels would not keep the pump running in inclement weather. Plans for expensive adaptations that might not work were abandoned in favor of low-cost and effective changes. But the key was redundancy, as many effective ways of meeting each need as possible.
All these considerations are even more important in a city. To have one electricity supplier for millions of people seems outrageously stupid. To have one public water supply is suicidal. To not have food produced locally is simply beyond comprehension. To rely on pumps for all these necessities… why did anyone think that would go well?
The reason Albuquerque and Vermont are more resilient than Houston, for all the glittering wealth in those glass towers, is that these places are inefficient. There are multiple layers of redundancy built into these communities — because we expect entropy to work as advertised and we’ve built our lives to accommodate it. When one thing fails, there is always a back-up. The eggs are never in one basket — and very few eggs are ever placed in a basket that is frayed and fragile or just needlessly frou-frou and complex. People walk and ride bikes (or horses) rather than depend upon cars, roads, gasoline, pumps, and on and on and on in dependency just to get somewhere (which destination often involves its own chain of dependency, mostly on pumped, and burned, oil). This, of course, also means that people are getting more exercise and are more healthy, which is another feature of the best systems and tools — they meet more than one need.
Redundancy applies not only to tools and infrastructure, but to social systems as well. These communities are webs of support and care with strands going in all directions, connecting everybody in multiple ways. If you don’t know how to do something or can’t get something done, you will know someone who knows someone who can, and that person will gladly do it — because that is simply the done thing among neighbors. When your wood delivery shows up on Monday and you can’t get to it until the next weekend, you may well find that someone has stacked it for you by midweek, or at least made a good start on the pile, especially if a storm is coming and the wood needs to be protected. People in these communities look out for each other in a storm. And when the power goes out, we turn on the generator to keep the essential electronica running, we check on our neighbors, making sure that everyone is safe, and we enjoy a quiet, candlelit time with our loved ones. In a resilient community, some of the best memories are made when the storm hits and power goes out.
The direct result of all these inefficiencies is that life is well-provisioned and rich, even in emergencies. However, an interesting indirect result is that there is less need of monetary wealth, even in emergencies. The best tools and systems are often the cheapest to build and maintain, and they do not break frequently. This is not a coincidence. Durable design is simple, with few moving parts to break down and take down the whole. Design for wealth building is the opposite. Our culture is designed for wealth building. It is designed to break — because the more breakage the more money is spent.
That is, until we’ve run out of some critical supply, like time. Because we are Houston.
So back to the lifeboat analogy. If you don’t already live in a Vermont or an Albuquerque, if your life is located in a Houston, how might you set about getting yourself prepared for the next hurricane? What goes in your boat?
For starters, big complex things are not going to fit in a boat. You can’t fit Houston in the boat, but there are ways to get around that. Build many boats. Not personal skiffs, because you can never fit all you will need in one lifeboat, but build for small communities. Small communities that are interconnected, but still mostly self-sufficient at least with respect to necessities.
To be honest, I don’t know how this will happen. I don’t know how to build redundancy into the water supply for an urban community. I don’t know how to produce food in an urban environment. I don’t know how to address heat and air conditioning and oxygen pumps and the need for transportation to meet needs. I really don’t know how to do all this without much money. But humans are clever, and even more so when working in small groups, sharing skills and talents and ideas. There are always workarounds and patches as long as you start the work before the power goes out. And there is a lot to be said for staying in the place you know and working with what you have. That is often the least costly option and the best for your community. It is also the best for your emotional well-being. Change is scary and destabilizing. Moving someplace unknown is terrifying. Humans romanticize adventure and exploration, but we generally avoid actually doing those things. The known is always preferable to striking out into the wilderness, even when the known itself is a wilderness of human-mediated ruination.
On the other hand, if you don’t want to face rebuilding Houston from the inside out, then sit down with Google and find a place that seems more likely to endure. Find a way to get there. And once there, do the work of building resilience. This late in the day, moving is probably a last resort for those who live in places that are beyond remediation. Houston may be one such. Or the new house-islands in New Hampshire and other such places where humans never should have built anything. But I am finding that places I once considered fragile are finding remarkable ways to build strength. Detroit is growing much of its food. Brooklyn has its networks of cooperative ventures for everything from farm produce to health care. Portland is rapidly slowing down and localizing transport with many roads turned into bike and walk ways. The very fact that New Orleans still exists should give us all hope. There are workarounds and patches for almost anything, as long as you work with nature… and entropy.
If I were making the decision knowing what I know now, I might have decided to stay in Albuquerque. It would have saved a good deal of costly stress. I would still be near my friends. I would still live in the place and by the natural and cultural rhythms that I love best. And there are ways to get around drought. Humans have been thriving in New Mexico for longer than most of the rest of the North American continent. There have been many droughts, but humans have weathered it all.
More broadly, there are no perfect places. There is no escape, no haven from all the effects of collapse. Wherever you are now is probably as good as it gets anywhere else. And wherever you are now has the tremendous advantage of being where you are, no costly upheaval necessary. You know your place. You have people. You may even have built a bit of refuge from the worst effects, a shelter from the storm. And that is the best we can do now.
Where you are will work as long as you do the work. Work on filling your boat with what you need. Build redundancy and inefficiency. Build webs and interconnected networks. Build small and simple, but durable and strong. The lesson in Beryl, the message from the weather gods of Vermont, is to stop relying on fragile money-based systems to meet your needs. Build real things. And that will keep you safe and secure when the power behind this whole system goes out.
