At least six people died in Texas and one in Louisiana as a result of Hurricane Beryl’s passage. A massive cleanup and restoration operation is underway to reconnect 2.1 million people who lost power during the storm’s disastrous passage through the region.
A 53-year-old man and a 74-year-old woman died when trees fell on their homes in separate incidents in Harris County, Texas, police said.
The Montgomery County Emergency Management confirmed the deaths of three people: a 40-year-old man under whom a tree fell while he was driving a tractor and two people whose bodies were found in a tent in a wooded area in Magnolia.
In Bossier Parish, Louisiana, northeast of Shreveport, Sheriff Julian Whittington said in a Facebook statement that a woman was killed when a tree fell on her house.
Beryl has been downgraded to a tropical depression, but more than 25 million people from Arkansas to Michigan were under flood alerts on Tuesday morning (9) as the storm moved northeast.
By Tuesday afternoon (9), more than 2.1 million people in Texas were without power, according to PowerOutage.us.
Fallen trees and strong winds brought down power lines across the Houston metropolitan area, with the impact worse than expected due to the storm’s slightly altered course, according to the power company.
The challenges of nature do not stop there
After the storm’s passage, Houston opened cooling centers on Tuesday (9) amid a heat alert predicting temperatures of up to 105 degrees for parts of southeast Texas. The National Weather Service office in Houston warned that widespread power and air conditioning loss posed dangerous conditions for local residents.
Source: NBC News