So, this should have been the first post about our 20th anniversary trip to Ontario, Canada, but those posts are on hold.

We arrived back in Houston on Tuesday evening after Hurricane Beryl barreled through on Monday. Today is Friday. Thankfully, there was no damage to our house or the houses of family in Beryl’s path. We are fortunate. Many have lost everything.

Power is still out around the region for 100s of thousands, but it was millions, so it’s getting better. However, if you are someone without electricity or generator power, then it’s still very miserable. Our electric power was restored after about 60-62 hours which is the fastest we’ve ever had it restored after a significant tropical storm/hurricane in the 26 years I’ve lived in this location. However, it just went out again during a thunderstorm as I started to type this update. We have a whole house generator – which has been a great investment after the Big Freeze of February 2021. We had a portable gasoline generator prior to that for hurricane outages to power refrigerator, some outlets and AC, but it couldn’t handle the load of the heater. It was easy for me to cost justify at that point!

I’m thankful for all the workers who arrived from far away to lend their expertise from getting trees off power lines to the linemen and women getting the power restored as quickly as they can. The teams on our street were from Ohio!  Unfortunately, this round of thunderstorms is going to cause more delays as I’m sure it isn’t safe to be out working around trees and power poles right now!

Many trees are down in our neighborhood, but it isn’t nearly as bad as Ike (its eye went right over our house) from what I can see. We were without power for 15 days then. However, for the greater Houston region, even though Beryl was a smaller storm, the impact to the infrastructure appears to be greater than Ike. Maybe partly because of the population growth since 2008 and I’m not sure the “permanent” infrastructure following the derecho we had a few weeks ago was fully repaired yet either.

Similar to our decision to spend the extra bucks to add the whole house generator after the freeze, it’s time for the electricity distributors like Centerpoint and Entergy in the region to do the same and find ways to reduce the impact of future events by hardening the distribution infrastructure further. Like my 90-year-old mother said, dealing with storms like this and dealing with the recovery are just part of living here, this won’t be the last one.

Ironically, most of the trees down on our property are from the neighbors. The exception is the chinaberry down by the lake and we are glad it’s now down! LOL!