Days after Beryl, Texans cope with debris, heat, rain, and no power

By Jaden Edison, Jess Huff, Pooja Salhotra, and Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune  

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A 30-foot garage structure, dismembered into rubble. An RV, tipped over. The last vestige of a boat dock, sitting in a front yard.

People love Sargent, Texas, a town on the Gulf Coast, for its beach homes and friendly atmosphere.

But days after Hurricane Beryl tore through communities along the coast and farther inland, snatching trees out of the dirt and knocking out power for millions of Texans, Rod “Doc” Pierce, a 70-year-old handyman with a cigarette and a cup of vodka, reached back to his days on the battlefield to relay what he saw: “It looks like Vietnam after a bomb raid,” he said on Wednesday.

Pierce lives on an RV site that saw water rise to hip-level during the storm, which slammed Texas as a Category 1 hurricane early Monday. Since then, he has had no power and no idea of when it would come back. It was so hot inside his RV without air, he said, that he slept on a chair outside overnight on Tuesday.

Pierce was one of 1.3 million Texas customers still without power as of Wednesday evening, with the full restoration process expected to take days or more. Matagorda County, which encompasses Sargent, was the “hardest hit” of all 121 counties included in the state’s disaster declaration.

In Houston, the city at the center of the storm, Mayor John Whitmire said on Tuesday afternoon: “Twenty-four hours ago, we were on the dirty side of a dirty hurricane. We saw it coming. It was very unpredictable.”