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POLK COUNTY — The Polk County Sheriff’s Office said a man has drowned after reportedly entering the river to help family members.
40-year-old drowns in Henderson County on Independence Day

The sheriff’s office responded to a drowning on July 5 in the Trinity River below the Lake Livingston Dam. Officials said 31-year-old Israel Hernandez went into the river to help family members that were stuck in the current.

The Polk County Sheriff’s Office and Texas Game Wardens searched the area and further down the river for several days.
3-year-old flown to hospital after nearly drowning in East Texas lake

Hernandez’s body was found on July 10 and has been taken to the Jefferson County medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy.

AUSTIN – Inside Higher Ed reports that Texas community colleges underwent a radical shift last year as the state ditched its old funding structure in favor of a new, ambitious performance-based model. Community college leaders say that, so far, the change seems to be paying off. Signed into law last summer, the new structure earned unanimous support from leaders of the state’s 50 community colleges—as well as the trepidation that comes with so significant a change. The goal of the new model is to incentivize community colleges to improve student outcomes and provide them with the cash to do so, rather than base funding on student credit hours, which makes funding heavily dependent on enrollments. To achieve that, state lawmakers budgeted $210 million more for community colleges in fiscal year 2024 than the previous year, according to documents from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that the number of CenterPoint customers in the Houston area without power dipped below 270,000 Sunday night, six days after Hurricane Beryl tore through the Houston area. The company said it expected to bring 350,000 customers online Sunday. The day prior it restored power to around 219,000 homes and businesses amid mounting pressure from government officials and customers alike to return power and provide transparent communication in the wake of Beryl. The company said it had returned power to 1.8 million customers total, about 80% of its service area, but said some restorations could take until July 19. Some areas in Houston do not yet have an estimated restoration time.

As of 8 p.m. Sunday night, Texas-New Mexico Power has restored power to 93% of customers impacted by Beryl, according to a statement. TNMP serves eastern parts of Galveston County and parts of Brazoria County. Around 11,000 customers were out at the beginning of the day, and the company’s crews 3,000 restored through Sunday, accrding to the TNMP statement. “TNMP is dealing with small clusters and individual service-level outages that are taking significant time and resources to restore,” according to an update on its outage tracker. The utility asked customers to report outages via the Report Outage button on the outage map site, by emailing hurricane@tnmp.com or by calling 888-866-7456.

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) — Vacuums sucked the water out of the seaside inn run by Nick Gaido’s family in Galveston since 1911 as power was still spotty nearly one week after a resurgent Hurricane Beryl swept into Texas. Blue tarp covered much of the torn off roof. Gaido scheduled cleanup shifts for the hotel and restaurant staff who couldn’t afford to lose shifts to the enduring outages.

The July 4th weekend was supposed to kickstart a lucrative tourism season for this popular getaway’s hospitality industry. But just dozens dotted the typically crowded beaches one week later. Gaido felt an urgent need to send the message that Galveston, Texas, is back open.

“We’ve dealt with storms in late August or in September,” Gaido said. “But when you have a storm that hits in the beginning of July, that’s different.”

Galveston — about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Houston — has certainly weathered its share of natural disasters. Etched into its collective memory is the fury of a 1900 hurricane that killed thousands back when the island was emerging as a crown jewel for the state. More recently, Hurricane Ike’s 2008 wrath flooded its historic downtown with storm surge as high as 20 feet and caused more than $29 billion in damage.

Yet even greater Houston’s storm-seasoned neighbors got taken off guard by Beryl’s sudden arrival. Crashing unusually early in the calendar, the Category 1 hurricane brought the island’s tourism-based economy to a halt during a time when local restaurants rely on an influx of beachgoers to lift revenues. Despite the widespread power outage, businesses and residents are buckling down.

In the harder-hit west side of Jamaica Beach, Way West Grill and Pizzeria was still without electricity on Saturday afternoon. Owner Jake Vincent felt stuck in limbo: he had heard power would return by July 19 but had hope it might come sooner.

The loss ruined his entire inventory. He said enough mozzarella cheese to fill the back of his truck had gone to waste. Also spoiled was an 8-foot chest full of fries and an estimated 3,000 pounds of pepperonis.

Vincent no longer expects much from a year he had anticipated would finally bring “daylight” for his family-run restaurant founded in 2018. He said most of their annual sales come during the three summer months and that “this tourism season is probably done for.”

“It complicates things,” he said. “You bank all your summer money to get through the winter.”

Downed cables and orange construction cones could be found along the road linking the touristy strand’s seafood shacks to the west end’s colorful short-term rentals. Crews from Houston-area utility CenterPoint stood atop lifts, sweating as they restored line after line.

Still without power Saturday morning, Greg Alexander raked debris to the edge of the street in his Jamaica Beach neighborhood. Despite sleeping in a balcony-level room in a house already raised high off the ground, he said water poured into the windows. Beryl’s horizontal winds blew rain right onto his bed.

It’s just a part of life here for Alexander. His family moved full-time to Galveston in 2017 after he said Hurricane Harvey dumped 38 inches of water into their Lake City home. Without power, he said they’ve been “appreciating our car’s air conditioning more than ever.”

He doesn’t plan to leave. He said trials only strengthen the community.

“People on the west end aren’t like everybody else,” he said.

Steve Broom and Debra Pease still lacked power on Saturday but had been beating the heat elsewhere. Broom said they’d already booked a hotel in Houston this week so his daughter could use the Galveston beach house where they’ve lived full-time for about five years. They spent only the first night in Galveston and opted to sleep the rest of the week in their nonrefundable room.

Steve Broom, 72, said he had never seen a hurricane come as early or increase as quickly as Beryl. Still, he joked that just one factor could force him to move off the island where he grew up.

“If they wipe out all these houses, then we’ll be front row and our property value will probably double or triple,” he said, before clarifying: “No, I hope that doesn’t happen.”

Anne Beem and her husband come every July from San Antonio to celebrate their birthdays. For her, the aftermath has been far worse than the hurricane itself.

They enjoyed a nice breeze with the windows open after the storm passed Monday. But she said Tuesday night brought “mosquito-geddon.” Hundreds of bugs filled the house so they slept in their car with the air conditioning blasting.

She said they also bought a kiddie pool to cool off before the power came back Thursday night.

“We just tried to look at it as an adventure,” she said. “Each day was some fresh hell.”

DALLAS (AP) — With around 270,000 homes and businesses still without power in the Houston area almost a week after Hurricane Beryl hit Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday said he’s demanding an investigation into the response of the utility that serves the area as well as answers about its preparations for upcoming storms.

“Power companies along the Gulf Coast must be prepared to deal with hurricanes, to state the obvious,” Abbott said at his first news conference about Beryl since returning to the state from an economic development trip to Asia.

While CenterPoint Energy has restored power to about 2 million customers since the storm hit on July 8, the slow pace of recovery has put the utility, which provides electricity to the nation’s fourth-largest city, under mounting scrutiny over whether it was sufficiently prepared for the storm that left people without air conditioning in the searing summer heat.

Abbott said he was sending a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas requiring it to investigate why restoration has taken so long and what must be done to fix it. In the Houston area, Beryl toppled transmission lines, uprooted trees and snapped branches that crashed into power lines.

With months of hurricane season left, Abbott said he’s giving CenterPoint until the end of the month to specify what it’ll be doing to reduce or eliminate power outages in the event of another storm. He said that will include the company providing detailed plans to remove vegetation that still threatens power lines.

Abbott also said that CenterPoint didn’t have “an adequate number of workers pre-staged” before the storm hit.

Following Abbott’s news conference, CenterPoint said its top priority was “power to the remaining impacted customers as safely and quickly as possible,” adding that on Monday, the utility expects to have restored power to 90% of its customers. CenterPoint said it was committed to working with state and local leaders and to doing a “thorough review of our response.”

CenterPoint also said Sunday that it’s been “investing for years” to strengthen the area’s resilience to such storms.

The utility has defended its preparation for the storm and said that it has brought in about 12,000 additional workers from outside Houston. It has said it would have been unsafe to preposition those workers inside the predicted storm impact area before Beryl made landfall.

Brad Tutunjian, vice president for regulatory policy for CenterPoint Energy, said last week that the extensive damage to trees and power poles hampered the ability to restore power quickly.

A post Sunday on CenterPoint’s website from its president and CEO, Jason Wells, said that over 2,100 utility poles were damaged during the storm and over 18,600 trees had to be removed from power lines, which impacted over 75% of the utility’s distribution circuits.

AUSTIN – KVUE TV reports that a third suspect arrested in the Round Rock mass shooting may have lost control of his gun while using a machine gun conversion device. Court documents obtained by KVUE reveal 18-year-old Keshawn Dixon is a documented gang member with an “extensive history” with Round Rock police. Dixon is the latest person to be arrested in the deadly shooting at the Juneteenth festival at Old Settlers Park. According to the affidavit, Dixon told authorities he was only at the festival before the shooting that left two women dead and 14 others hurt. Witnesses stated that they recognized Dixon even though he was wearing a white ski mask and a gray hoodie. One of Dixon’s family members also allegedly admitted to a witness that he was involved in the shooting.

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that two months after May’s derecho took CenterPoint Energy’s outage-tracking map down, the utility’s data systems are still malfunctioning on an unprecedented scale, new data shows. In the wake of Hurricane Beryl, the ongoing technical challenges are exacerbating concerns about CenterPoint’s ability to adequately track and respond to power issues in real time. On Monday, as millions dealt in the dark with Beryl’s landfall – and the flooding, oppressive heat and storm damage that followed – the utility’s technology crisis left customers in a frustrating information vacuum. CenterPoint’s outage portal displayed only general statistics on power loss in its Bayou City service area, which covers a dozen counties. The information proved useless to customers searching for updates on local outages and recovery times.

Meanwhile, the system that once fed CenterPoint’s map – which has quietly continued to report data under the hood of the utility’s website – became overwhelmed almost immediately after Beryl reached the greater Houston area. It glitched for hours through Monday afternoon. The utility waited an additional 24 hours before posting a new outage-tracking map online. And that map came with a disclaimer warning about potential inaccuracies and lags. “With the tool not functioning as it should, we worked to provide a short-term solution during the multi-day event,” said Logan Anderson, a CenterPoint spokesperson, in an email. “We recognize the inconvenience to our customers.” New data made available by a Maryland-based technology company shows what the CenterPoint system should have been reporting all along. A wave of blackouts kept more than 60% of Harris County’s CenterPoint customers in the dark for over 24 hours. Restoration efforts progressed slowly, leaving over 865,000 customers still without power at 5 p.m. Thursday.

AUSTIN – KXAN TV reports it has been almost three years since Tanya Roberts’ son, Colton, was hit by an impaired driver while on his way back to school and killed. The man driving the car, Scott Taylor, pled guilty to intoxicated manslaughter. Roberts is now a victim advocate for Moms Against Drunk Driving and she wants to see some changes in Texas law when it comes to intoxicated manslaughter convictions. Currently, someone convicted of intoxicated manslaughter will face anywhere between two and 20 years in prison and a maximum two-year suspension of their drivers license. That means when someone gets out of prison they will be able to get behind the wheel again. That is concerning to Roberts. She wants to see that suspension period extended.

“I would like to see a person’s right to drive a deadly weapon more permanently taken away from them if they have repeat offenses, and if they have either killed someone or caused harm,” Roberts explained. She believes the community is safer without those people on the roads. Second, she also wants to see stricter restrictions on people who were proven to be on drugs when driving. This comes from her experience in her son’s manslaughter trial. She said even after a toxicology report showed Taylor was on drugs during the night of the crash that killed her son, he was still allowed to drive while out of jail on bond. During the judicial process, Taylor failed a drug test that he had driven to, proving Roberts’ worst fear. “For our case, we knew the defendant was on drugs. We knew he was on drugs when he killed Colton. We know he was continuing to use drugs and we still could not get him off the street for a number of months, which is pretty frightening,” Roberts said. His license was finally suspended and taken away from him following the failed drug test.