Category 1 Hurricane Beryl Tests Houston’s Resilience, Exposes Gaping Flaws

Houston’s first direct hit from a hurricane in decades showed how vulnerable the nation’s energy capital remains.

Dylan Baddour | Climate News

When Hurricane Beryl entered the Gulf of Mexico, the city of Houston had little reason to believe it was about to take its first direct hit from a tropical cyclone in decades.

Initial forecasts called for the storm to make landfall in northern Mexico, hundreds of miles away, after battering the Caribbean islands and the Yucatan Peninsula. Instead, it veered sharply north and struck an unfortunate target. Its center passed just west of Houston, bringing the hurricane’s violent eastern edge directly into the city’s downtown area.

Beryl, which had reached Category 5 strength in the Caribbean, hit Texas as a Category 1 storm. It flooded hundreds of homes and knocked out power to millions in the former wetlands of the nation’s energy capital, plunging the city into days of chaos and underscoring the vulnerability of the fourth-largest U.S. city.

For Matt Lanza, a meteorologist and editor of Space City Weather, that raised a worrying prospect: What if the mild hurricane that hit Texas had been stronger?

“It’s really uncomfortable to think about,” Lanza said. “It’s an extremely plausible scenario, it’s not far-fetched.”

If a Category 3 or 4 storm followed Beryl’s path, Lanza said, it could dramatically change the face of Houston. This week’s experience suggests the city is ill-prepared to handle such a disaster.

“It could be like New Orleans after (Hurricane) Katrina, where a large portion of the city would be uninhabitable for a period of weeks or months,” Lanza said. “So what’s our plan to deal with that? I don’t know that we necessarily have one.”

The last Category 4 storm to hit Houston was Hurricane Carla in 1961, when fewer than a million people lived in the city and air conditioning was still a novelty. The last Category 3 storm was Hurricane Alicia in 1983. Hurricane Ike, a Category 2 storm, made landfall east of Houston in 2008, hitting the city on its weaker western flank.

Most of the recent damage has been caused by tropical storms that brought much more rain than wind, such as Tropical Storm Allison in 2001. Hurricane Harvey struck the central Texas coast as a Category 4 in August 2017 and reached Houston as a stagnant tropical storm with moderate winds but the heaviest rainfall on record in the United States, drenching the city with more than 50 inches of rain.

When Beryl struck Monday, it was wind, rather than rain, that knocked out the city’s electrical infrastructure, apparently catching the local power company, CenterPoint Energy, off guard. Four days later, CenterPoint was still working to restore power to hundreds of thousands of customers.

“A Category 1 hurricane shouldn’t take out your power grid,” said Kerry Emanuel, a veteran hurricane researcher and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. “I think you have a problem with the power company, frankly.”

Hurricanes are expected to intensify, he said, as greenhouse gas emissions warm the atmosphere and ocean, accelerating evaporation and the transfer of heat into a warmer atmosphere that already holds more moisture.

“One demonstrable effect of greenhouse gases is the proportion of Category 3 or 4 hurricanes,” Emanuel said.

When Hurricane Beryl formed in the Atlantic in early July, hundreds of miles off the coast of Texas, it reached Category 4 status — the earliest Category 4 storm on record. Record-breaking temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean this year have led to predictions of a very active hurricane season.

This is the second time this summer that storms have caused widespread and prolonged power outages in Houston, after a rare inland windstorm in May ravaged the city, blowing out windows from high-rise buildings. The past decade has also seen severe widespread flooding in Houston in 2015, 2016 and 2017, a crippling ice storm in 2021 and a severe drought in 2023 that ravaged underground utility lines.

This year’s hurricane season is just beginning. Atlantic storms typically become more powerful during the summer, peaking in September.

“Houstonians are understandably exhausted by the frequency of these events, but it is critical that we remain prepared for future events,” said state Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Democrat who represents much of east Houston. “We must focus on increasing state aid for preventative measures and reactive relief efforts.”

These storms hurt economic prosperity and social mobility, said Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University in Houston and a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

Less affluent neighborhoods tend to be the most affected by storm damage, Bullard said, because they have less infrastructure than more affluent neighborhoods. In the 20th century, he said, racial segregation forced black families to live in low-lying areas that regularly flooded.

In the United States, the wealth of middle-income families is largely based on their home ownership, Bullard said. When stormwater overwhelms a home, the financial damage can last for generations.

“This repeated disaster impacts communities for decades, it creates a theft of wealth accumulation,” said Bullard, who lost his car in Hurricane Alicia in Houston in 1983. “It’s stealing their inheritance and it means the amount of equity financing for the next generation is diminished.”

Houston takes steps to bolster its defenses.

Offshore, federal officials are advancing plans to build a massive $57 billion system of barriers and gates that has been called the largest civil engineering project in U.S. history and is expected to take 20 years to complete.

The project is designed to avoid the worst-case scenario: a major hurricane barreling directly into Galveston Bay, sending storm surge into the Houston Ship Channel and the massive waterfront complexes of refineries and petrochemical plants that make up the heart of America’s energy sector.

“I can’t imagine what 150 mph winds could have done to this community, that’s what terrifies me.”

In the city, officials have recently spent hundreds of millions of dollars to widen bayous, the natural waterways that run through Houston but that nevertheless overflowed during Storm Beryl. Officials have also bought up thousands of homes in flood plains. But thousands more remain.

Jim Blackburn, co-director of Rice University’s Center for Severe Storm Prediction, Disaster Education and Evacuation, said the city would have to fundamentally change its development model to mitigate damage from recurring storms.

“We should be very slow to rebuild in areas that have been flooded,” Blackburn said. “It’s not a popular position, but I think it’s a very important position.”

Blackburn, a veteran environmental attorney, was surprised by the extent of the damage to Houston’s electrical system from Beryl’s 90-mile-per-hour winds, and by the length of the ongoing effort to restore power.

“I can’t imagine what 150 mph winds have done to this community, that’s what horrifies me. What’s a Category 4 or 5 storm going to do to us?” Blackburn said. “They’re coming.”

But fundamentally reforming Houston is easier said than done. It would mean rolling back, to some extent, decades of booming development fueled by energy-age hubris.

Greater Houston began as a collection of villages scattered among swamps and bayous on the edge of a prairie. By the mid-20th century, there was “a greater awareness of the vulnerability of the city” and “a greater appreciation of the ecological and environmental infrastructure of the city,” says Jonathan Levy, a professor of American history at the University of Chicago who grew up in Houston’s flood-prone Meyerland neighborhood.

But that changed after World War II, when a period of rapid expansion led to “a growing ignorance of these realities,” said Levy, who has written about Houston’s environmental struggle.

The oil and gas industry was revolutionizing the world, primarily based in Houston, where it was fueling the massive expansion of concrete highways, entire landscapes of urban sprawl, and a low-density, gigantic city based on the private automobile. At the same time, the growing global oil industry was increasing greenhouse gas emissions that intensify tropical storms.

“When it comes to climate policy, if you don’t have a plan for Houston, you don’t really have a plan,” Levy said. “It’s hard to imagine an energy transition without the participation of Houston’s energy sector.”

As for the city, the transformation would involve making room for water, moving away from the edges of bayous to create a giant network of wide greenways across the metropolitan area.

“We need to limit construction, condemn properties and compensate owners to bring this green infrastructure logic back to life,” Levy said. “If we can’t do that, I don’t really see how we can do it.”

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization.