Though it wasn't the Category 5 it was in the Atlantic, Hurricane Beryl brought devastation to Texas earlier this week. It hit the Lone Star State as a Category 1. In addition to various tornados, winds from the storm caused millions to be without power. Millions still remain without power (although that number is lower and lower).
In order to determine, which areas have power, Texans had an ingenious solution. They started using the Whataburger App to check. For those who didn't know, Whataburger started in Texas, and there are a lot of the restaurants in the state. When I went to San Antonio, I felt like I could trip and land at a Whataburger. They seemed to be on every street corner. Well, people started using the app as a power outage map. If the stores are closed then that means they probably didn't have power.
Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas impacting 2.7 million people. It went through Texas on Monday, and as of Wednesday, 1.7 million still don't have power. The storm is currently making its way North. Now a tropical storm, it's continuing through Arkansas in Ohio. The storm still "may bring flooding and a few severe thunderstorms with damaging winds and tornadoes," states the National Weather Service.
Hurricane Beryl Goes Through Texas
More than 100 tornado warnings occurred due to Hurricane Beryl. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden approved a major disaster declaration for Texas. "The greatest concern right now is the power outages and extreme heat that is impacting Texans," said Biden in a statement. "As you all know, extreme heat kills more Americans than all the other natural disasters combined."
Texans bashed Centerpoint Energy, the main electric provider in Houston, for not being transparent. They only ended up using the Whataburger app because they said that CenterPoint Energy didn't have a ma of their own. "Handy since the electric company doesn't show a map," user @BBQBryan said in the post.
People quickly realized that open locations were marked orange. Meanwhile, other area are marked grey. It formed a makeshift map. Meanwhile, CenterPoint does have a power outage map, but you can't search for an address.
