Excerpt:
Heat-related illness is a growing danger for those without air-conditioning after last Thursday’s violent storms. South Texas will also see extreme heat.
More than 200,000 homes and businesses are still without power around Houston, four days after a violent storm complex killed seven people. Meanwhile, excessive heat is building over Texas, placing many residents — especially vulnerable groups like older adults — in danger from the soaring temperatures.
CenterPoint Energy, the utility serving the area, says it is making steady progress in restoring power to the nearly 900,000 customers who were affected by the storm. Over 75 percent have their power back and the utility’s goal is for nearly full restoration by Wednesday evening. To assist people who still lack air-conditioning, the city of Houston has opened cooling centers and water-distribution locations.
The effort to finish the power restoration in Houston cannot come fast enough as heat indexes — a measure of how hot it feels when factoring in humidity — may reach 100 degrees there in the days ahead and 105 by the weekend.
As muggy as it will be in Houston, the heat will be even more brutal in South Texas, with record-testing highs of at least 105 to 110 degrees. On Sunday, temperatures shot up as high as 113 near Texas’s border with Mexico.
Around Houston, highs of at least 89 or 90 degrees are forecast for the foreseeable future.
“Summer is arriving early. Afternoon heat indices will be near 100°F all week long,” the National Weather Service office serving the Houston area wrote on X. “Early season heat is especially dangerous as we haven’t had time to adjust to the temperatures…”
