A mini-roundup, with mostly non-CenterPoint things.
An Xfinity spokesperson said Wednesday that service was restored to approximately 355,000 customers — or about 36% of those experiencing service outages — in the 36 hours after Hurricane Beryl moved out of the Houston area.
Millions of Houston area CenterPoint customers lost power after a Category 1 hurricane swept through the region, and about 1.3 million are still without power as of early Wednesday afternoon.
Xfinity said most of its current service outages are tied to power loss at homes and businesses.
Approximately 620,000 customers still did not have service, an Xfinity spokesperson wrote, and more than 700 technicians are deployed.
“At our peak, there were approximately 975,000 residential and business customers who experienced storm-related temporary loss of service. Most service interruptions are due to power outages,” wrote Senior Director of Communications and Public Relations Foti Kallergis. “Comcast’s critical network facilities remained online during and after the storm.”
We had Internet service for a few hours after we lost power on Monday. (We used one of our backup batteries to power it and the WiFi router.) At some point our cable modem stopped receiving a signal, and that was the case through Tuesday; I stopped bothering to check after that. When the power came back, so did Xfinity. I am aware of at least one person who had power but no Internet (I don’t know if this person is a Comcast user; other providers had similar reports), so the two are not completely correlated. But if you have power, you probably also have Internet.
One of the things that made the lack of Internet service so frustrating was that cellular service was also biting it.
As Monday dawned and it became apparent that Beryl’s visit would be much more than a glancing blow, power went out and people began calling for help via their cellular phones.
And in many cases — and for many of us, it felt like in most cases — these devices we rely on so heavily were worthless. If you were like me, you could not get online to check news or storm conditions.
You couldn’t talk to friends or reach them for help. Calls wouldn’t go through, or if they did, they’d quickly drop, or one party could not hear the other. I had several conversations in which the other person sounded like they were some kind of weird robot.
Even texting, which cellular carriers say is the best way to reach out during a disaster, failed regularly. For example, I didn’t hear from my daughter, a regular user of texting via Apple’s iMessage, for several hours, when suddenly I got a burst of a half dozen old texts that suddenly went through.
The situation wasn’t confined to just one carrier —– I saw dozens of complaints on social media from customers all the major telcos. On Facebook, I asked people to sound off about their current power, internet and cell status. At this writing, nearly a hundred folks have responded, and every carrier appears in the messages. (That said, based on the responses AT&T seems to have fared worse, followed by T-Mobile and then Verizon.)
[…]
Cell towers connect to both the power grid and data network grids, and a disruption to either of those links can result in diminished or totally unavailable service. Disruption can happen because of a lack of power, or a cut to the lines delivering electricity or data.
Most modern cellular towers have some kind of backup for power — either batteries or generators. Travis Profitt, AT&T’s director of network services, told me that in the case of his company’s towers, there may be a mix of both at any given site.
“Battery backup lasts a few hours, then the fixed generator kicks in,” Profitt said. That generator may use some kind of fuel, such as diesel, or run on natural gas, depending on whether the latter is available at the tower site.
He said there are a handful of towers that don’t have backup power, but those locations are in place only to plug holes in coverage. Other towers nearby can provide some service.
Profitt said that, during a hurricane, slowdowns or lack of cellular availability is often caused by a glut of network traffic. Everyone’s trying to communicate at once, and in some instances, a tower may be offline.
Carriers design their wireless networks so a tower’s coverage overlaps with others nearby. If one tower has issues, another can take up the slack. But with high traffic volumes, the network might still have trouble keeping up.
In addition, if the tower closest to you goes down but another one nearby can talk to your device, it may make a connection but still be far enough away that the signal is weak. (That situation, by the way, can reduce your phone’s battery life.)
I didn’t have any specific issues with texting or calling on Monday or Tuesday as far as I could tell, though my daughter did have some issues with making calls. But any kind of web browsing was extremely flaky – ironically, I tried multiple times to use the Xfinity app to report my outage, and I couldn’t connect. To be sure, that could have been a back end problem, but plenty of other sites were slow to the point of not loading at all. Things were better by Wednesday, and as noted in the story all of the providers reported that their issues were mostly fixed. So at least we had that going for us.
Meanwhile, on the government side, there was this.
Texas was quick to ask for federal aid when Hurricane Ike hit in 2008, when Hurricane Harvey struck in 2017, and again when Hurricane Hanna touched down in 2020. But that did not happen this year as Hurricane Beryl approached Houston, triggering a round of finger-pointing between the White House and Texas officials over how quickly federal supplies including food, water and generators should have been distributed.
President Joe Biden told the Houston Chronicle on Tuesday that he had to personally reach out the state’s acting governor, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, for a formal request a day after the storm hit, knocking out power to more than 2 million CenterPoint Energy customers.
“I’ve been trying to track down the governor to see — I don’t have any authority to do that without a specific request from the governor,” Biden said in a call.
That’s not how Texas leaders have handled past hurricanes.
The night before Harvey first made landfall in Texas in 2017, Abbott already had a request signed and submitted to then-President Donald Trump in anticipation of the storm making landfall near Rockport. Days later, the storm hit Houston, dropping more than 50 inches of rain on the city.
In 2020, Abbott requested a major disaster declaration from Trump before Hanna made landfall in South Texas as a Category 1 hurricane.
“I submit this request in anticipation of the impacts of Hurricane Hanna, currently forecast to make landfall as a hurricane along the southern coast of Texas with continuing impacts to counties along the entire Texas coast and further inland,” Abbott said in his letter to Trump.
Abbott’s predecessor, Rick Perry, filed a major disaster declaration with then-President George W. Bush on Sept. 12, 2008, the day before Hurricane Ike made landfall in Galveston as a Category 2 storm with 110-mph winds.
Let me just jump in here to say: all three of those instances occurred when there was a Republican President. Coincidence? You tell me.
Back to the story. Abbott hasn’t said whether he started working on a disaster declaration before swanning off to Korea for whatever it is he was doing there. He says he left Dan Patrick in charge, and ol’ Danno says he needed to see what the damage looked like before he could get on that. (He hasn’t waited to whine about the media, which is more in his wheelhouse.)
But neither he nor Perry waited to do assessments in the past, and a former FEMA official said major disaster declarations do not need to wait for thorough on-the-ground reviews. Since Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana in 2005, governors have routinely filed major disaster declarations even before storms make landfall to ensure federal supplies and personnel get to an area fast.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said in a statement on Tuesday that the Federal Emergency Management Administration was left to draft the wording of the Beryl declaration for Texas, something state officials typically do themselves.
FEMA said in a statement on Monday that it had emergency supplies, including 500,000 meals and 800,000 liters of water, “ready to distribute at the state’s request.”
Abbott’s absence during a major weather event is unusual, said Darryl Paulson, a political scientist at the University of South Florida.
“It’s standard operating procedure for governors of a state in a natural disaster situation to cancel any trips they may have planned to stay in their state and handle what potentially could be a massive state emergency,” Paulson said.
In 2008, when Hurricane Gustav was in the Gulf of Mexico, Perry and then-Florida Gov. Charlie Crist canceled plans to attend the Republican National Convention in Minnesota even though both had spent weeks planning their trips. The storm never hit Texas or Florida, but because it could have, governors from all the Gulf Coast states stayed home.
“The governor’s responsibility first is to the people of his state and protecting the people of his state,” Paulson said.
Sure would be nice to have a Governor like that, wouldn’t it?
Anyway. If you or someone you know is dealing with major damage post-Beryl, beware of scammers.
On Wednesday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced a disaster declaration was approved by President Joe Biden, which will allow affected residents to apply for federal disaster aid.
Now more than ever, it is important to keep a close eye for official news from city and county officials before giving your information away for any form of aid.
Scammers have become more creative and convincing, especially after emergency situations. Scams can come in several forms, such as text messages, emails, phone calls, or simply a person knocking at your door offering disaster-recovery services.
Here are some tips on how to identify and avoid scammers based on consumer advice by the Federal Trade Commission:
A lot of this advice will sound familiar, but there’s a reason these scams work. Read and review and watch out for the bad guys.
Hard to imagine we would look at 2008, when Rick Perry was governor and GWB was president, as a time of functional government. What a deep mess we are in with the current regime.
Thankful that we have a competent administration in DC.