At least 10 U.S. deaths were attributed to Beryl, now a post-tropical cyclone, and its aftermath as a vast number of Texans remained in the dark late Tuesday.
At least nine people in Texas and one person in Louisiana have died as cleanup, recovery and restoration operations were underway in Houston and along the state's Gulf Coast.
Beryl, which struck the coast as a Category 1 hurricane early Monday, continued to decay while also carrying heavy rain north to parts of the Missouri and Mississippi valleys en route to the Great Lakes and northern New York on Wednesday, the National Hurricane Center said.
On Tuesday, federal forecasters called the remnants of the storm, 15 miles west-northwest of Indianapolis, a post-tropical cyclone. Parts of the front moved over St. Louis, Missouri, on Tuesday and were expected to exit overnight, federal forecasters said.
Its winds of 30 mph represented a fraction of the 80 mph punch it had at landfall early Monday, but it still had the potential to produce 2 to 4 inches of rain overnight, they said.
Worries about possible tornadoes associated with the system's unstable air were diminishing late Tuesday, with the National Hurricane Center downgrading its forecast from "several" tornadoes possible in multiple states to "a couple of tornadoes" possible in the Ohio Valley overnight.
In Texas on Tuesday, officials were still counting the dead.
A 53-year-old man and a 74-year-old woman died when trees fell onto their homes in separate incidents in Harris County, Texas, police said.
Houston police confirmed Monday that information security officer Russell Richardson, 54, “was caught in rising flood waters and tragically lost his life.”
Two additional deaths in Harris County, which mostly underlies the city of Houston, were blamed on carbon monoxide from portable generators. Officials continued to warn residents not to use fuel-powered portable generators indoors, even in a garage.
Montgomery County Emergency Management confirmed the deaths of three people: a man in his 40s who was struck by a tree while he was operating a tractor and two people whose bodies were found in a tent in some woods in Magnolia.
In Galveston County on Tuesday, someone who depended on medical oxygen died after electricity was knocked out, a generator failed, and the batteries on a portable oxygen concentrator went dead, state Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, said at a news conference.
In Bossier Parish, Louisiana, northeast of Shreveport, Sheriff Julian Whittington said in a statement on Facebook that a woman was killed when a tree fell on her house.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is acting governor while Gov. Greg Abbott is out of the country on a diplomatic trip, said Tuesday he requested, and was granted, a federal emergency disaster declaration through the Federal Emergency Management Agency after he spoke with President Joe Biden to aid in the state’s recovery process.
More than 25 million people from Arkansas to Michigan were under flood watches Tuesday morning as Beryl moved northeast.
Up to 5 inches of rain and thunderstorms were possible in the storm's path, the National Weather Service said.
There were 110 tornado warnings Monday — the most on record for any July day — including 67 in Shreveport.
Sarah Glass and her husband were in their living room in Wharton, Texas, 60 miles southwest of Houston, as the storm passed over when the lights went out. He went to check the generator, and she went to find flashlights and candles. Moments later, an enormous tree smashed into their home.
“And as I came into the kitchen, [there was a] big crash and the ceiling had fallen in,” she told NBC News. “We were in the living room and we moved away — that’s where all that spiked wood came down from the ceiling, so we probably would have been killed."
Utility tracker PowerOutage.us said late Tuesday that more than 1.7 million electricity customers across Texas remained in the dark. As of Tuesday night, 1.4 million customers were without power in the Houston area, utility CenterPoint Energy said in a statement.
The company said that it had restored more 800,000 connections in the past 24 hours and that it would get to 1 million reconnected by the end of Wednesday. Crews, however, still faced high water in parts of greater Houston, where more than a foot of rain fell in the last 24 hours.
Fallen trees and strong winds have downed power lines across greater Houston, with the impact worse than expected because of the storm's slightly altered course, the company said.
“We haven’t really slept,” Eva Costancio said as she gazed at a large tree that had fallen across electric lines in her neighborhood in the Houston suburb of Rosenberg. Costancio told The Associated Press she had already been without power for several hours and was worried that food in her refrigerator would be spoiled.
“We are struggling to have food, and losing that food would be difficult,” she said.
Houston opened cooling centers Tuesday amid a heat advisory that forecast a heat index as high as 105 degrees for parts of southeast Texas. The National Weather Service field office in Houston warned that widespread loss of power and air conditioning posed dangerous conditions for locals.
Social media users posted video Monday of torrential rain in Houston, severe thunderstorms in St. Louis and flooding in Bryant, Arkansas.
