‘This storm has broken people’: After Hurricane Beryl, some consider leaving Houston

HOUSTON – Houston is no stranger to natural disasters, but living through two crippling power outages in two months has driven some in the Texas city to consider what may be the ultimate evacuation plan: moving out.

The more powerful of the storms,

Hurricane Beryl devastated the power infrastructure

over nearly the entire city.

When it hit, thousands of people were already living in shelters and hotels, according to state officials, because they had been displaced by an earlier weather event, the spring thunderstorms that caused wind damage and flooding.

Driving around Houston, it can be hard to tell which of the storms that crashed through the city had mangled the highway billboards, torn out the fences or knocked down the trees still strewn along roadsides.

Everyone knows how long it took to get their power back from the first big storm – and when they lost it again. A second round of spoiled food. Of sweltering temperatures. Of emergency plans. In many cases, repairs to homes that were damaged in the major May storm had yet to be finished when Beryl arrived as a Category 1 hurricane.

For some, it was too much.

“I’m just done,” said Ms Stephanie Fuqua, 52, who moved to Houston in 2015 and plans to leave in the fall.

Ms Fuqua’s home had flooded during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. She shivered under blankets for three days when the state’s electrical grid failed during the winter of 2021. Then came the most recent storms, which left her sweltering without power.

“I’m tired of the trauma,” she said. When her lease is up in November, she said, she plans to move to a place where she has family, possibly Arkansas, Mississippi or South Carolina.

“I love Houston. If it weren’t for the hurricanes and CenterPoint, I would stay here,” she said.

More than 2.2 million customers of local utility CenterPoint Energy were without power at the peak of the outages last week. As at late July 15, around 135,000 were still in the dark.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who was on an economic development mission in Asia for most of the previous week, blamed the utility for the widespread power failures, saying on July 15 that it had “dropped the ball”.

He threatened to take action himself if the company did not provide clear plans for improvement.

The back-to-back blows left Houston, which prides itself on its resilience and optimism, unusually shaken and unsure of the future.

Those who could afford them scrambled for generators, fearing what a storm even more powerful than Beryl, rated as a Category 1 when it made landfall, might do.

“Beryl was the weakest a hurricane could be. Why does it feel like Houston isn’t the same?” The Houston Chronicle asked in a headline.

“I think this storm has broken people,” said Mr Lawrence Febo, 47, who works in the energy sector and was without power for six days in the hurricane after being in the dark for four days in the May storm. “It’s the energy capital of the world and we cannot electrify a couple of million people?”

Then there was the matter of trees falling onto houses during the two storms.

“It came through my kitchen, took out half my house,” said Mr Michael McCormack, 32, describing the large pine tree that crashed down in the May thunderstorms.

Mr McCormack, a remote worker in software sales, had moved to Houston a little more than a year earlier from Seattle, drawn by the “cost of living, friendly people and better weather”.

He was out of power for eight days – one of around one million customers who lost power during that storm.

Then Hurricane Beryl hit and he lost power again. For days.

Ms Leslie Schover, 71, a psychologist, said she had been thinking about moving, but there was the matter of a destination.

“I just think, ‘Where would I go?’” she said. “There are climate-change weather dangers everywhere. And if I tried to live closer to my son in New York, it’s very expensive.”

Climate migration is a global phenomenon, but Houston may be particularly vulnerable.

The city has long attracted transplants from other parts of the country seeking job opportunities and lower living costs.

Those who have recently arrived may have less of what is sometimes called “place attachment”, making them perhaps more open to departing after a natural disaster, experts in disaster response said.

A 2020 study of disasters in the United States going back nearly 100 years found that “severe disasters increase out-migration rates” in the years after.

“Areas that fail to protect local quality of life in the face of extreme events will suffer a ‘brain drain’ as people and jobs will migrate to relatively safer areas,” one of the authors of the study, Professor Matthew Kahn, an economist at the University of Southern California, said in an e-mail.

Even before the storms, Harris County, which includes Houston, had been experiencing net negative migration from other parts of the country: Since 2016, according to US census data, more people have left Harris County for other counties than have moved in from elsewhere. That trend continued after 2017 when Hurricane Harvey flooded large areas of the city.

In 2023, for the first time, pollsters from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs asked about whether city residents had considered leaving.

More than half of those surveyed said yes, with about one-fourth saying it was because of the weather.

Ms Katie Mears, who leads US response work for Episcopal Relief and Development, a non-profit, said one important aspect of climate migration is the disparity in who can afford to engage in it.

“The narrative of overcoming is appealing, but some people do leave,” the pollsters said.

“In these migration patterns, it’s usually the rich people who go first,” they said, as well as those who are younger and more highly educated.

At a cooling centre and food distribution site in north Houston on July 15, no one talked about leaving town as they idled in a long line of cars waiting for water and some food to take home.

One woman, Ms Nancy Evans, 96, said she could not imagine moving from her house in the Acres Homes neighbourhood.

Mr Perry Murry, 60, who grew up in Houston and has used a wheelchair since he was shot as a teenager, said he took refuge in his Toyota Camry during the recent outages, relying on its air-conditioning to stay cool.

He did the same in the 2021 winter freeze, blasting the car’s heat. He said he would never leave.

“I’ve got Texans on my hat, Texans on my shirt, Texans on my feet,” he added, pointing to his apparel, emblazoned with the Houston Texans football logo. “This is my city.” NYTIMES