Hospitals in Houston ‘backed up’ after hurricane, as millions in US swelter

Damaged power lines over a darkened street in Galveston, Texas, after Hurricane Beryl hit the Texas coast on Monday, July 8, 2024. Lack of electricity has strained the health care system in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city. (Meridith Kohut/The New York Times)

By Isabelle Taft, Judson Jones and Alan Blinder

A searing heat wave that has engulfed much of the western United States for over a week will continue to bring dangerously high temperatures through Saturday before sliding east to the central and eastern U.S. by Sunday.

The situation is especially pressing in Texas, where, two days after Hurricane Beryl left millions without power, officials began moving patients into a temporary field hospital in Houston’s massive sports complex Wednesday.

The lack of electricity has strained the health care system in the nation’s fourth-largest city. Doctors determined that it was not safe to discharge some patients to homes without air conditioning, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said at a news conference, leading to “backed up” hospitals and three-hour wait times for ambulances to drop off patients.

Across the West, large parts of California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah were under excessive heat warnings, indicating “extremely dangerous heat conditions.” Officials suspect heat to be the cause of more than 90 deaths reported in the West this month, though each death requires a full investigation and could take months to sort out.

More than a dozen high temperature records were expected to be broken Thursday, from the West coast to the High Plains, where temperatures will soar from the upper 90s to the triple digits. Some locations in the typically hot deserts and interior valley location of California, Arizona and Nevada will once again hit the 110s and 120s.

Nevada did not have a single location Wednesday that was not under a heat advisory or warning. It was the fifth straight day in which Las Vegas reached maximum temperatures of at least 115 degrees, a record. And more trouble loomed, with an excessive heat warning scheduled to last until Friday night.

“Right now, it’s just a matter of getting inside, being smart as far as hydrating yourself and just living your life as well as you can,” said Oscar Goodman, who moved to Las Vegas in 1964 and was mayor for 12 years before he relinquished the job to his wife. “Thank God we have enough air conditioning here that people are comfortable once they get inside, of course. And they’re smart enough, because they’re in Las Vegas, not to go outside.”

Pedestrians sometimes felt scarcer than jackpots. Playgrounds stood empty and silent. Merely walking through a parking lot meant squinting — not at the sunlight blanketing the region, but at a heat so punishing that eyes hurt without ever actually watering.

And the mercury’s surges have come so fast that awestruck forecasters could hardly keep up.

“Remember 20 minutes ago when hitting 117°F was a big deal?” the local National Weather Service office wrote on social media Wednesday. “Well, the airport hit 118°F.”

Back in Texas, more than 1 million utility customers remained without power early Thursday, down from a high of 2.7 million in eastern Texas on Monday, at Hurricane Beryl’s peak. Patrick said the prolonged outage, which could extend for days, would be the largest ever seen by the city’s utility, CenterPoint Energy.

One person died of heatstroke in Matagorda County, 90 miles southwest of Houston, on Tuesday afternoon, officials said Wednesday.

State officials said they would set up 250 beds in an arena at NRG Park, the sports complex that includes an NFL stadium and houses the famous Houston rodeo, to receive and treat hospital patients who are stable and can be discharged but do not have a cool home to go to.

The facility opened with 100 beds Wednesday morning, and half of those were full by the afternoon, said Lori Upton, CEO of the SouthEast Texas Regional Advisory Council. Upton said the temporary hospital is expected to remain in operation for five to seven days.

The heat and humidity in Houston on Wednesday and expected Thursday is not unusual for this time of year, but because of the widespread power outages, National Weather Service forecasters in the area lowered their threshold for issuing heat alerts.

Typically, a heat advisory would be issued in Houston when the heat index — a measure of how hot the air feels, considering both temperature and humidity — is expected to reach 108 or higher. But the forecasters issued one for Wednesday when the index was expected to top out at 101.

Carrington Gilbert, 33, who lives in the Medical Center area of Houston, was waiting Wednesday morning for the power to come back on, more than 48 hours after it went out in her home. She and her 4-year-old daughter were cooling down with hand-held fans that they charged in her car, and were planning to head to a friend’s house if the power stayed out.

Gilbert said she was worried about her grandparents in nearby Pearland, who were also without power. Her cellphone service was down as well.

“If it gets too hot in your house, you can’t call anyone for help,” she said.

Temperatures in southeast Texas will be a couple of degrees lower than average for the next several days but humidity will make it feel like it is hotter than 100 degrees.

The East Coast, especially the mid-Atlantic, will get a reprieve to end the week, after hitting a heat index of up to 110 degrees Wednesday afternoon.

The heat wave in California and the Northwest is expected to ease in the next few days, but it will not end completely. Temperatures are likely to remain 10 degrees above average or more through the weekend.

The worst heat will shift east. From coast to coast Sunday, almost the entire contiguous U.S. is forecast to be above average. A heat wave will settle in and is expected to persist the longest across the Southeast and the eastern coast, lasting into at least the middle of next week.