Houston distributes water as more than 500,000 remain without power after devastating storms

The city of Houston opened new distribution centers Saturday to distribute water as about 500,000 customers remained without power following severe storms that killed seven people in the region.

Houston was expected to reach a high of 90 degrees Saturday as the city and Harris County recover from tornadoes and 100 mph straight-line winds that struck without warning Thursday.

Seven deaths — four in Houston and three in unincorporated Harris County — were blamed on weather effects, including falling trees and a fire started by lighting.

More than 500,000 customers in the Houston and Harris County areas were without power around 11 a.m. Saturday, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.

“Our crews’ visual inspections and damage assessments of our infrastructure yesterday showed that we have a lot of work to do in the coming days,” Lynnae Wilson, CenterPoint Energy’s senior vice president of power, said in a statement. communicated.

Three schools were damaged, one with a tree falling into a classroom, another with about 12 broken windows and one with a collapsed wall in a classroom, the superintendent of the Houston Independent School District said Saturday , Mike Miles.

Miles called the relatively low number of damaged buildings throughout the district a “blessing.” A decision will be made Sunday on whether there will be school Monday, and a lot will depend on the power situation, he said.

“Today and tomorrow will say a lot about the power in these schools,” Miles said.

About 90 of the district’s 270 schools have no electricity, he said.

Elsewhere in the country, about 4 million people were under flood watches from southern Mississippi to the Florida Panhandle, according to the National Weather Service.

Additional rainfall of about 1 to 3 inches on already saturated ground could cause flash flooding, the weather service in Mobile, Alabama, said, and some roads have already flooded.

The central and northern Plains are expected to experience storms starting Sunday, affecting about 2 million people in Kansas, southern Nebraska and northern Oklahoma. The cities of Wichita and Topeka, Kansas, were among those that could experience large hail and damaging winds.