For electrical outages see:
As I am writing this the are 2.6 million customers [households…] without power out of 13.8 customers in the state of Texas.
I have one co-worker who lives in Houston, and he reported yesterday morning that his power was out and he would be offline until further notice.
Since our main office (and my office desk, if I ever went to it) is in South Florida, we are very understanding of the situation.
Way up here in Canada we’ve got:
Potential for heavy rainfall due to the remnants of Hurricane Beryl Wednesday and Thursday.
Hazards:
Torrential downpours giving rainfall rates of 20 to 40 mm per hour at times.
Localized rainfall totals possibly well in excess of 50 mm.
Houston here. We lost power for 14 hours. The eye was almost directly centered over our house!
Part of our fence blew down, but it is decrepit anyway. Mr Rebo built a new fence on the back section during the spring and was trying to hold off until the fall for the right and left sections. He is adamant that he wants to build it himself and not hire a company to do it because he is very particular and wants it built HIS WAY. The back section held up very well! 
We have a few small generators, so had fans and lights and refrigerators plugged in. We are seriously considering a whole-house generator, but they are quite a bit of money. It would be nice to not worry about air conditioning.
Anyway, we came through just fine. Lots of others didn’t, I’m sorry to say. I got pretty annoyed at CenterPoint Energy’s outage tracking website being down. They are “under construction” or some BS.
Their emergency info website is run by a computer under the desk of some flunky in their HR department whose office is in an otherwise dead strip mall right near the beach. Where the water is currently 6 feet deep.
When it’s working well it can keep up with about 1 customer inquiry per second. More than that and it overloads and shuts down. But they did tell the TX state regulator they had a outage tracking website and it worked. So you’ve got that going for you.
FWIW my neighbor got a 22kw generac , he bought it himself, hired someone to build the concrete plinth , then hired an independent electrician to wire up the interconnect, and another independent contractor to do the gas line. Got it all done for 10 k . The Home Depot/ Lowe’s people who do it all charge about 18k so if you don’t mind project managing the whole thing yourself it can be done for a whole lot less money.
I went with a 10kw tri fuel generator and had an interconnect wired up. I have to wheel it out , connect up the gas line and the 50amp power cable so maybe 20 mins to get it going , but all done for 2k.
That sounds good! Mr Rebo can lay the concrete - plinth? - do you mean slab? (I’ll go google it.)
He was talking about doing that same thing. I would prefer it to be a turnkey job, but he likes to be the general contractor and hire the people. I just worry about getting ripped off by some fly-by-night electrician. I’m paranoid that way!
Yes plinth is a concrete slab, but would typically be raised up a bit above the level of the house slab , depending on flooding potential etc.
I propose they retire the name Beryl it’s been used a dozen or more times for tropical cyclones.
My family in Houston, league city and Nassau bay are without power. Not much in the way of damage thankfully.one pays $4000 a year for flood insurance!
Remnants of Beryl flew through her last evening.
It was a right mess.
Tornados spawned up everywhere.
Nothing like the islands and coasts.
Cooled things off a bit.
Just saw an article that people are using the Whataburger app as a power outage tracker since the centerpoint site is still down.
( lots of whataburger stores in Houston and the app shows if they are open or closed , obviously some humor is probably intended)
My son, his girlfriend, and my two granddaughters came to stay with me until their power is turned on. They lost everything in their freezer and fridge. They were grateful for air conditioning! I’m hoping it comes on today for them.
That’s less wacky than it seems:
Hello from Texas.
I was staying in my RV near College Station when the storm went by (50 miles east of me). 60+ mph winds and driving rain for several hours. Got to test the RVs roof and seals, and happily no leaks at all. Spouse was worried about the winds, but I assured her it handles 70 mph winds easily – just have to make sure it stays pointed upwind. 
Youngest’s apartment complex is nearby, and suffered from high winds and falling trees. I went by after the storm passed and spent a while sweeping up glass and gathering up parts of the roof and clearing the parking/sidewalk. Youngest’s unit was unaffected but next door had broken windows and lots of water damage.
While running errands the next day, I saw little damage other than tree limbs down. And the Whataburger was open, but busy.
The eye apparently just missed me, so the eyewall pounded my neighborhood with winds to the west, then shifting north, then subsided when the winds were northeast. Makes sense for a counter-clockwise rotation with the storm just to the southwest.
The first fallen tree branch (of many) went right through my car’s rear window.
We lost power, cellular, and internet on Monday. Not even text messaging worked until late Tuesday.
I have a generator but not a transfer switch, so my house is a web of extension cords. The generator is nowhere near big enough to run the a/c. I’ve been able to find propane so far.
Centerpoint, the power distributor, keeps sending out updates that 1/3 of remaining customers should get power in 2 days.
My family is now staying at a friend’s enormous house with electricity and a/c and internet.
As miserable conditions persist, Houston area residents are growing increasingly frustrated with CenterPoint Energy, the city’s primary utility company that is responsible for restoring the vast majority of outages.
“Almost universally people have lost patience with CenterPoint,” City Councilman Ramirez told CNN.
Centerpoint will need to increase its political contributions.
That’s sooo much cheaper than building reliable infrastructure and maintaining large repair capacity of both equipment, parts, and manpower.
I don’t see why the heat needs to be dangerous. Why don’t the affected people just hop on a plane to Cancun? Are they stupid?
Moving on to the East Coast. In my possibly inaccurate opinion, I think that it is in particular danger this year. The water temperature on the east coast up through Cape Hatteras is 28c, which is well within the temperature at which hurricanes can form. But perhaps more importantly, it has been like this since early June or even May (I forget which). Even though I don’t have formal earth sciences education, it seems to me that this sustained heat allows the warm water to penetrate deeper, meaning it is even more impactful to hurricane formation and sustenance than it normally would be this time of year when the temperature is more surficial, even though the water temperature is close to average currently.
Of course there are a lot of other factors that go into storm formation and growth such as wind shear. But I fear that if a storm starts to go up the coast, it won’t die down and may even grow as it goes north.
“Oceanic heat content” or “… heat content anomaly” is the buzzword word and you’re right that it’s elevated as well both up the coast and in the MDR out in the Atlantic
Our power came back on yesterday afternoon. We were lucky that we only had some downed tree branches, but quite a few of our neighbors lost huge trees, though as far as I know none fell on a house.
We have a chest freezer, so we transferred all of the refrigerator’s frozen stuff into that. I have a fishing addiction so there’s always plenty of stored ice, which kept our refrigerated items cold in three coolers.
On Wednesday I met my father-in-law at the halfway-point between us (about a hundred mile drive) and borrowed his generator. That kept the chest freezer running, plus we could keep a couple of fans, a light or two, a small TV, and phone/lantern battery chargers running.
Lots of folks were not so lucky.