Texas The National Test Platform For "Compound Disasters" - As Category 1 Beryl Showed When Houston's Grid Failed
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Beryl, which made landfall at Category 1 strength, caused extensive flooding, brought 80-mile-per-hour winds and wrecked Houston’s electrical infrastructure. It was far from the fiercest weather event the region had seen, but it took CenterPoint, the local utility company, two days to publish an outage map and two weeks to restore power to the nearly 3 million homes and businesses that lost it. Residents were left to bake in the sticky summer heat, the air heavy with chemicals released by nearby refineries and petrochemical plants that had either shut down or sustained damage during the storm. More than 40 people died from heat, fallen trees or drowning. Beryl is among the most recent examples of a compound disaster, where extreme weather events unfold at the same time, or where the fallout from one worsens that of another. “When a compound disaster strikes, we don’t only have multiple ongoing disasters, but disasters that start to bounce back and forth on one another,” said Jennifer Trivedi, a core faculty member at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center. “[They] impact the ways that people might adapt or recover, which further complicates the situation. This is particularly true for people who are already vulnerable.”
Beryl grew to Category 5 strength unusually early in the hurricane season. Although the storm weakened by the time it slammed into Houston, the damage it caused was still severe. It seems to have caught Texas leaders by surprise. President Joe Biden told the Houston Chronicle that he had to reach out to the state’s acting governor, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the day after the storm hit to see if Texas required federal aid. Such aid can’t be provided until state leaders request it, usually before a disaster strikes. Patrick, accompanied by the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, W. Nim Kidd, deflected blame and denounced “lies” about the state’s slow response from Texans, media outlets, the president, and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo. In an ABC Channel 13 live stream, Patrick said that the president was “either totally incompetent and doesn’t remember what he said, or he’s just lied to me and Texas.” (Gov. Greg Abbott was on a previously scheduled economic development trip to Asia and didn’t return until after the hurricane blew through).
Texas is the most disaster-prone state in the country, with 372 federal disaster declarations since 1953, according to the Texas General Land Office. It’s the hardest place in the nation to obtain health care and among the most expensive for out-of-pocket care, according to an analysis of the latest federal data by The Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit, nonpartisan research group. What storm victims like Sandra Edwards believe to be a languid state response to Beryl was just one of many institutional failures.
Once the CenterPoint grid collapsed, there were few reliable alternative power sources. Officials at all levels of government lacked a complete list of facilities with generators or whether they were well-maintained or functioning. The few health care facilities that serve low-income Houstonians went days without power, leaving many without essential care or medication. Outdated protocols meant that emergency responders couldn’t reach some people with disabilities by text message or other means. A registry that was supposed to alert local emergency planners to the needs of disabled Texans was incomplete. And, since Texas rarely punishes polluters for unplanned “emission events,” residents of industrialized parts of the city likely inhaled dangerous chemicals during and after the hurricane. The storm’s aftermath created a full-blown public health emergency of the sort that’s becoming increasingly common as a result of climate change.
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https://publichealthwatch.org/2025/01/15/texas-is-unprepared-for-compound-climate-disasters/
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