Texans seek out the few places with electricity in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl
As more than a million households remain without power following Beryl's impacts in Texas, anywhere with electricity, including gas stations with just one working pump, are swamped.
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00:00Well, we're going to shift gears here and head back out into the field where we were
00:03checking in with all of our storm chasers yesterday, including Mike Scantlin, who is
00:07live for us this morning.
00:08You are in one of the suburbs of Houston, Stafford, Texas, and you saw quite the scenes
00:13yesterday.
00:14Mike, can you tell us what it was like being out there?
00:16Yes, good morning.
00:20So I spent the main core of the storm quite a ways southwest of here where the eye came
00:26ashore.
00:27With such a disorganized storm, it's kind of hard to tell where the strongest winds
00:30are going to set up, as we learned yesterday.
00:32So I was in Bay City where there was plenty of stuff flying around, power outages, and
00:37a lot of heavy rain and some flooding.
00:39But most of those heavier bands and the heavier wind actually set up on the east side of the
00:45storm, on the eastern part of the core on that onshore flow.
00:49So while I did have some sheet metal flying around and some dangerous situations there,
00:53I missed out on the worst part of the storm, so I made my way east.
00:57And, you know, areas like Freeport, Texas, Surfside Beach, and then all the way up into
01:02the Houston Metro, just absolutely raked by extreme winds here.
01:07I think Houston was actually caught off guard by how strong the winds were for just being
01:11a Category 1 hurricane.
01:14So, you know, power outages are still a major issue here.
01:17Behind me, you can see gas is also hard to come by.
01:21Only one pump at this gas station is currently pumping, and they're going to be out soon.
01:25I don't know if all these cars are even going to be able to fill up, but power is hard to
01:29come by here in the Metro.
01:30The flooding has receded, and that's good news.
01:33But power is hard to come by, hotels are full, and, you know, slowly but surely, you're starting
01:38to hear power come back on.
01:39I think the power was actually energized in this neighborhood about 10 minutes ago.
01:43I heard one of the transformers coming back to life over here, but, you know, still over
01:48a million without power here in the Metro.
01:51But this is a huge storm that went all the way up the east side of Texas.
01:54Many tornadoes yesterday.
01:55Center Point here in Houston, the Houston Metro, has over 900,000 people restored.
02:01Still over 1.1 million outages currently being reported here in the Houston Metro.
02:07Mike, I heard you say you missed the worst part of the storm, and often we hear residents
02:11say that, and they're happy, right, that they missed the worst part of the storm, but your
02:14job as a storm chaser, you want to be right in the action, and a lot of that action came
02:18with the tornadoes.
02:19Talk about how the storm did spawn the severe weather.
02:24Well, you know, hurricanes don't, they don't do well with dry air.
02:31Whenever they, it's called dry air entrainment, and that kind of hampers development of a
02:35storm, especially a strengthening storm like we had after Beryl hit the Yucatan and kind
02:39of struggled to come back together.
02:41You know, with a few more hours over that warm water, it would have been a much different
02:44story, a much stronger storm, as we can see with it being a strengthening storm coming
02:48on shore and overperforming.
02:49But with that dry air that hurts the hurricane development, that actually enhances tornado
02:54development, especially in the outer edges of the core and those feeder bands.
02:57So a little bit of dry air in the mid-levels actually increases buoyancy for the rotating
03:02updrafts in the supercells.
03:04So you know, it kind of hurt the development of the hurricane, but it actually increased
03:08our tornado potential significantly, and I think that tornado potential also exists today
03:13as the storm accelerates and pushes northeast.
03:16Yeah, absolutely.
03:17Fascinating when you look at the atmospheric ingredients when it comes to tropical weather.
03:21We appreciate you being out there and giving us a firsthand look and listen of how things
03:25were yesterday for Beryl.
03:26Storm chaser Mike Scatland, thanks again for joining us on AccuWeather this morning.