As of Tuesday morning, 2.2 million Texans are without power following the destruction caused by Hurrican Beryl.
Power restoration could take days or weeks which is causing concern as high temperatures are predicted for the state through the remainder of the week.
Southern Texas took the brunt of the storm which was labeled as a Category 1 hurricane Monday.
More than 2.5 million homes and at least eight people have been reported dead in Texas and Louisiana. The storm brought flooding rains and winds that turned roads into rivers, ripped through power lines and tossed trees onto homes, roads and cars As recovery and cleanup efforts are underway in southeast Texas, including the Houston area, extreme heat is expected to bear down on the region creating hazardous conditions for those working outdoors, the elderly, people with chronic medical conditions, children and those without adequate cooling.
When a person is unable to cool their body down amid prolonged heat, they are at risk for damage to the brain and other vital organs, as well as other heatrelated illnesses such as heat exhaustion and stroke.
A heat advisory was put in place for southeast Texas on Tuesday, where the heat index could hit 105 degrees and high temperatures in the 90s are forecast across the region.
Texas utility CenterPoint Energy has borne the brunt of the outages, with nearly 2 million customers in the dark Monday night, according to PowerOutage.us. Though the company had braced for Beryl’s impact, it said the damage was more severe than it had expected.
The utility expects to restore power to 1 million customers by Wednesday night.
At its peak, Beryl was a record-shattering Category 5 storm but has since been reduced to a far less powerful system with winds of 30 mph. However, what is left of Beryl will produce flooding and tornadoes in the U.S. as it moves inland through mid-week.
Beryl became the first storm in the Atlantic hurricane season to make landfall in the US after tearing a devastating path through the Caribbean, where it caused at least nine other deaths.
The storm marks the start to a hurricane season experts say will be far from normal.