Hurricane-strength winds unexpectedly blew through Houston Thursday, leaving four dead, hundreds of thousands without power and the country’s fourth-largest city scrambling to repair damage.
Mayor John Whitmire confirmed the deaths and “some twisters” and told reporters Houstonians should all stay home Friday if they are nonessential workers. Local schools were closed until Monday. Falling trees and a crane accident appeared to cause three of the deaths, emergency officials said.
“We’re still in recovery mode,” Whitmire said. “We had a storm with 100 mile-per-hour winds, the equivalent of Hurricane Ike, considerable damage downtown, glass.”
Trees were down across the city, most traffic lights were out and many residents were without electricity. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the county’s elected executive, said on X that the debris looked significant, and crews worked through the night to try to clear major thoroughfares. Some 1,500 mutual assistance crews were traveling to the area to help restore power, she said.
On Friday morning, there were more than 785,000 people without power in the Houston area, according to poweroutage.us. There were also nearly 116,000 without power in Louisiana.
Broken glass, tree branches and insulation from the inside of buildings cluttered the streets of downtown Houston on Friday morning as crews and janitorial staff hurried to clean up the area.
Kris Larson, president and chief executive of Downtown Houston +, an organization of business leaders, was busy sweeping glass off the streets alongside some of his crews. Larson said the storm’s intensity caught everyone off guard.
“It was a normal Thursday afternoon, and then suddenly an hour later, massive storm,” Larson said. “But we know how to manage these kinds of situations.”
Larson estimated that it would take days to completely clean up the damage in downtown Houston. Dozens of contractors were on their way to help clean up, he said.
At Houston’s Bush International Airport, there was a small number of delayed flights after 103 cancellations on Thursday, according to FlightAware, a flight-tracking site.
The storm came after rain doused East Texas in recent weeks, flooding homes, washing out roads and pushing reservoirs to capacity. Forecasters earlier this week warned that more rain could create a “nightmare scenario.”
Matt Lanza, a Houston meteorologist and managing editor of the website Space City Weather, wrote that emergency preparation had been so focused on the threat of heavy rain that the wind danger came as a secondary surprise. In the evening, he began to see a velocity signature on radar that he had never seen before, pointing to a violent tornado or likely destructive winds. It escalated to one of the most ferocious storms he has seen, he said.
“I’ll close with a bit of a sobering note: Hurricane season begins in about 2 weeks,” Lanza wrote. “We know a lot about flooding. Most of us know about surge. Very few knew about wind and what it’s really like. Many do now. Use this experience.”
Noah Johnson was walking in the Houston neighborhood of East Downtown toward a light-rail station when the storm winds and rains suddenly picked up.
The 43-year-old said he ran into a Burger King to take shelter with five other people as the street lost power.
“The storm was stronger than I expected,” Johnson said.
The storm was over as quickly but the fast-food restaurant remained without power, Johnson recalled as he surveyed the damage downtown Friday.
“It sucks because I really wanted some onion rings,” said Johnson with a smile.