Texans using Whataburger app as power outage map after Beryl knocks out electricity for millions
Because CenterPoint Energy -- the main electric provider in the Houston area -- does not have an outage map, some residents in the areas affected by Beryl have resorted to checking the Whataburger app to see if there's power near them.
HOUSTON, Texas (KXAN) -- Some Texans are taking a unique approach to determining whether their area has power following Hurricane Beryl's landfall along the state's gulf coast Monday morning, which left millions without power.
Beryl made landfall Monday around 4 a.m. near Matagorda, Texas, as a Category 1 Hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 80 mph. Beryl was later downgraded to a tropical storm as it moved north/northeast through the state.
The storm left flooding and wind damage in its path, and at least six people have died in Texas because of it. At one point, nearly three million homes and businesses were without power, according to reporting from the Associated Press.
Because CenterPoint Energy -- the main electric provider in the Houston area -- does not have an outage map, some residents in the areas affected by Beryl have resorted to checking the Whataburger app to see if there's power near them.
People are doing this by checking the app's location map, which shows which restaurant locations are open and which areas are closed. The open locations are marked orange, and the ones that are closed are marked grey, which is a good indicator of whether or not there's electricity to operate the location.
Some have taken to social media to spread the word about the ingenious use of the fast food app, one person saying in a post on X that has over 33,000 likes that the app works well as a power outage tracker.
"Handy since the electric company doesn't show a map," user @BBQBryan said in the post.
CenterPoint does have an "outage tracker" page on its website, which shows a current outage count and the most recent updates on the restoration process. The website also has tabs for customers to sign up for alerts when the power goes out, but there is not a way to search for an address to check for an outage.
Shortly before 1 p.m. Wednesday, there were still 1,350,107 customers without power, according to CenterPoint. The outage count updates every five minutes.