Six people have been confirmed dead in Texas, including a 53-year-old man and a 74-year-old woman, who were killed when trees fell on their Harris County home during Hurricane Beryl, which recently swept through the United States. , reported Sky News Its American partner NBC.
Houston police said Russell Richardson, a 54-year-old IT security officer who was on his way to work when he was caught in rising floodwaters, also died. The victims in Texas included a man in his 40s who hit a tree while driving a tractor, and two people found dead in a tent in the woods in Magnolia.
Also, more than 21 million people from Arkansas to Michigan were under flood warnings Tuesday as the storm moved northeast and a massive cleanup operation began to restore power to 2.3 million energy customers.
The storm, which was downed to a tropical depression on Monday, downed 10 long-distance power lines and felled hundreds of trees, some of which also brought down local power lines.
Nearly 2 million of those affected by the outages are customers of CenterPoint Energy, Houston's main electricity provider, which said it hopes to restore service to about 1 million people by Thursday.
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said thousands of workers will be sent to restore power, with priority given to places like nursing homes.
We are not yet done with the difficult conditions and expect a process that will take several days to restore power.
– The deputy governor said.
Houston, the fourth-largest city in the United States, also suffered heavy damage as Beryl’s rains battered coastal areas. Local television stations showed video of a dramatic rescue of a man who climbed onto the roof of his pickup truck trapped in fast-flowing water, one of at least 25 rescues in the city, most of them of people trapped in vehicles. Floodwaters.
In May, eight people died and nearly a million people lost power when a previous series of storms hit the city.
Forecasters say damaging winds and flash flooding will continue as Beryl moves inland. And with heat waves raging in parts of the region, restoring power is a pressing task, even if temperatures drop slightly with the storm.
The storm could threaten to develop into tornadoes as it moves inland, and the National Weather Service confirmed on social media that tornadoes have been spotted in northeastern Louisiana.
Featured Image: (Houston Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images)
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