MIT Hurricane Scientist Kerry Emmanuel On Beryl "A Category 1 Shouldn't Knock Out Your Power System" [View all]

When Hurricane Beryl entered the Gulf of Mexico, the city of Houston had little reason to believe it was about to take its first direct hit from a tropical cyclone in decades. Initial forecasts predicted the storm would make landfall in northern Mexico, hundreds of miles away, after it battered Caribbean Islands and the Yucatán Peninsula. Instead, it veered sharply north and hit an unfortunate bullseye. Its center passed just west of Houston, dragging the hurricane’s violent eastern edge directly over the city’s core.

Beryl, which had reached category 5 strength in the Caribbean, hit Texas as a category 1 storm. It flooded hundreds of homes and knocked out power for millions of people in the muggy former swamplands of the nation’s energy capital, throwing the city into days of chaos and highlighting the vulnerability of the fourth-largest U.S. city.

For Matt Lanza, a meteorologist and managing editor of Space City Weather, it raised a disturbing prospect: what if the mild hurricane hitting Texas had been stronger? “It’s really uncomfortable to think about,” Lanza said. “That is a scenario that is extremely plausible, it’s not far-fetched.” If a category three or four storm followed the same path as Beryl, Lanza said, it could drastically change the face of Houston. This week’s experience suggests the city is ill-prepared to handle such a disaster. “It could be like New Orleans after [Hurricane] Katrina, where much of the city is uninhabitable for a period of weeks to months,” Lanza said. “So what is our plan for that? I don’t know that we necessarily have one.”

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When Beryl hit on Monday, it was wind, rather than rain, that wrecked the city’s electrical infrastructure, apparently catching the local power company, CenterPoint Energy, off guard. Four days later, CenterPoint was still working to restore power to hundreds of thousands of customers. “A cat 1 hurricane shouldn’t knock out your power system,” said Kerry Emanuel, a veteran hurricane researcher and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. “I think you’ve got a problem with the power company, frankly.” Hurricanes are expected to intensify, he said, as greenhouse gas emissions warm the atmosphere and ocean, supercharging evaporation and heat transfer in a warmer atmosphere that already holds more moisture. “A demonstrable greenhouse gas effect is the proportion of hurricanes that turn out cat 3 or 4,” Emanuel said.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/12072024/hurricane-beryl-warning-shot-for-houston/