When the power goes out in Houston, some neighborhoods are filled with the sound of gas-powered backup generators, creating an instant sonic guide to the city’s social divisions.
In wealthier parts of the city, the sheer number of generators can create a pervasive roar. In other neighborhoods, there is a low rumble from a handful of machines — or just one.
“My neighbor has it just for his fridge,” said Theresa Del Bosque, 62, describing the rare home in her north Houston area with a generator. “Most people cannot afford it.”
With around a million customers still without power on Thursday, more than three days after Hurricane Beryl tore through the city, the question of who has a generator, and who can get one, has become an urgent one.
Even for residents who could afford the often steep prices, finding a generator was proving to be a challenge in the immediate aftermath of the storm. The ones left on Thursday were still flying off the shelves at hardware stores where even the cheaper versions were priced at nearly $1,000.
A Harris County sheriff’s deputy stood guard at a Home Depot in north Houston that had recently received a shipment of generators and chain saws, for cutting apart fallen trees. The store had already reached an occupancy limit, and a line stretched outside of those waiting to get in.
With so many people suffering in the heat, and a limited number of generators available, many who have their generators roaring outside have grown concerned about theft.
Some people have taken to locking their units with chains to fences. A secretary who was at home with her two sons in northwest Houston said she grew concerned about their portable generator outside after hearing that men with a pickup truck had hopped a fence and tried to steal a generator nearby. Her husband, who was traveling at the time, messaged their 20-year-old son: Get the rifle ready.
Houston has become a major market for generators, including for the most expensive kinds of backup generators that can power an entire large house, air-conditioning included. A growing number of single-family homes are being sold with generators as an amenity: 1,600 last year, about three times as many as in 2018, according to the Houston Association of Realtors.
Demand began to spike for whole-home generators after 2021, when the failure of the state’s power grid during a spate of frigid winter weather led to a dayslong power outage.
Then this year, back-to-back, large-scale power outages hit the city — first a major thunderstorm in May, then the hurricane — driving many more of the city’s wealthier residents to decide that they could no longer count on reliable power.
Stephen Cruise, a co-owner of the Generator Supercenter, which installs generators from the Generac company that typically cost between $12,000 and $14,000, said that Texas, and particularly Houston, was the company’s hottest market, surpassing Florida.
“Everybody wants to control their own power,” he said. “But it costs.”
Mr. Cruise said his company was doing 125 installations a week in Houston and racing to keep up with demand.
“We’re getting thousands of calls,” he said. “The demand is there to do 500 a week right now, but you can’t scale that big that fast.” The installations take months, meaning that they are not a solution for homeowners sweltering through the current outage.
The city government has also faced a shortage of generators, and was cycling a pair of large units between public facilities, including cooling centers. Mayor John Whitmire said on Wednesday that some fire and police stations had to close because of a lack of backup power.
“It is incomprehensible to me,” he said of the situation on Wednesday. “That’s what we’re here to fix.”
Jason Ryan, an executive from CenterPoint Energy, the local utility, said in testimony to a state commission on Thursday that it had restored power to more than half of the 2.26 million customers who lost it during the hurricane.
But he said around 500,000 customers would still be without power into next week. “Those are in areas where we are having to rebuild the infrastructure,” he said.
The hurricane and its aftermath highlighted economic divisions in a city that is home to oil and gas billionaires and millionaires, and has also long been a landing place for refugees and migrants. Electric power, and the ability to back it up with a generator at home, has provided an increasingly obvious illustration of the fault line.
Without power, sleep is difficult, heat can be dangerous and food rapidly spoils. Local officials set up several distribution sites to hand out food to those who ran out or could not afford to replace what had gone bad in the power outage.
At a food distribution event in north Houston on Thursday, people waited for hours in a line of cars that stretched from a community center to a nearby interstate.
Vonda Melvin, 59, speaking as she drove slowly forward in her car with the windows open, said she bought a used generator long before the storm and was using it to keep her food fresh in her refrigerator. But the gas to keep it running was a big expense, she said — she had been to the gas station seven times to collect fuel.
“I was here in Hurricane Ike,” she said, adding that not much appeared to have improved since that storm struck in 2008. “This is 2024. What advancements are there? How long do I have to wait?”
Micela Gracia, 55, who was also waiting for food, said she had no power at home and no generator — “too expensive.” In the past, she recalled, the lights came back on much more quickly. “This time is crazy,” she said.
For those able to afford a portable generator, the storm and the prolonged outage set off a scramble to find one across a city where stoplights were still not working in places, gas could be hard to come by and stores remained closed.
Michael Mitchell, a lawyer who lives in Bellaire, a kind of internal suburb surrounded by Houston, lost power during the storm and went early the next day to his downtown office, which had power, to get out of the heat. He heard from a colleague that there were dozens of generators available at a recreational vehicle store about an hour away in the suburb of Katy. He and his wife raced out there, and sure enough, they had a full stock, but no power to process credit card purchases.
So they drove to a Home Depot that appeared online to have some in stock. It did not. A huge sign on the store said as much, he recalled.
Then they saw a tractor supply store. There was a line of five people out the door, he said, and eight available generators, for $899 apiece.
“We hooked the generator up at 5:30 when we both got home from work,” Mr. Mitchell said. “And as luck would have it, our power came back on two hours later.”
Ms. Del Bosque, who lives on a street without many generators, said her husband, a contractor, had spent the day after the hurricane installing generators at two homes in the wealthy West University area, each costing around $5,000 or $6,000.
Their own home, she said, had been so sweltering that they could not bear to be inside for more than a few minutes. “I have a thermometer, but I haven’t even looked at it — it’s just hot,” she said.
Ms. Del Bosque said she and her husband were asking themselves whether they should consider stretching and finally buying a generator — if they could find one. But it was not an easy decision.
“Do you want to go on vacation?” she said. “Or do you want a generator?”
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