HOUSTON — As the Houston area works to clean up and restore power to hundreds of thousands after deadly storms left at least seven people dead, it will do so amid a smog warning and rising temperatures that could pose health risks.
National Weather Service meteorologist Marc Chenard said on Saturday that highs of about 90 degrees were expected through the start of the coming week, with heat indexes likely approaching 100 degrees by midweek.
“We expect the impact of the heat to gradually increase … we will start to see that heat risk increase Tuesday into Wednesday through Friday,” Chenard said.
The heat index is what the temperature feels like to the human body when humidity is combined with the air temperature, according to the weather service.
“Don’t overdo yourself during the cleanup process,” the weather service’s Houston office said in a post on the social platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
The Houston Health Department said it would distribute 400 free portable air conditioners to area seniors, people with disabilities and caregivers of disabled children to contend with the heat.
Five cooling centers also were opened — four in Houston and one in Kingwood.
The widespread destruction of Thursday’s storms brought much of Houston to a standstill. Thunderstorms and hurricane-force winds tore through the city, and a tornado touched down near the northwest Houston suburb of Cypress.
More than a half-million homes and businesses in Texas remained without electricity by midday Saturday, according to PowerOutage.us. Another 21,000 customers were also without power in Louisiana, where strong winds and a suspected tornado hit.
CenterPoint Energy, which has deployed 1,000 employees to the area and is requesting 5,000 more, said power restoration could take several days or longer in some areas, and that customers need to ensure their homes can safely be reconnected.
“In addition to damaging CenterPoint Energy’s electric infrastructure and equipment, severe weather may have caused damage to customer-owned equipment” such as the weatherhead, which is where power enters the home, the company said.
High-voltage transmission towers that were torn apart and downed power lines pose a twofold challenge for utility companies because the damage affected transmission and distribution systems, according to Alexandria von Meier, a power and energy expert who called that a rare thing. Damage to just the distribution system is more typical, von Meier said.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez reported late Friday that three people died during the storm, including an 85-year-old woman whose home caught fire after being struck by lightning and a 60-year-old man who had tried to use his vehicle to power his oxygen tank.
Houston Mayor John Whitmire previously said at least four other people were killed in the city when the storms swept through Harris County, which includes Houston.
School districts in the Houston area canceled classes Friday for more than 400,000 students and government offices were closed.
Houston Independent School District Superintendent Mike Miles said Saturday that he hoped to reopen schools on Monday, but that is dependent upon the restoration of electricity in school buildings.
In light of the storm damage, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Whitmire both signed disaster declarations, paving the way for state and federal storm recovery assistance.
A separate disaster declaration from President Joe Biden makes federal funding available to people in seven Texas counties that have been affected by severe storms, straight-line winds, tornadoes and flooding since April 26.
Information for this article was contributed by Jamie Stengle, Valerie Gonzalez and Lisa Baumann of The Associated Press.
