Awakening to a gray morning. Winds are much more blustery, a bit of rain is falling, some limbs are down in the backyard, and power is flickering (wires touching briefly out there somewhere).
The Houston Chronicle reports widespread outages in the region.
More than a half million homes and business were without power in the greater Houston area because of Hurricane Rita's high winds and lightning, power company officials said early today.Efforts to fully restore electricity will not start until wind gusts subside. A full restoration may take weeks, said Patricia Frank, spokeswoman for CenterPoint Energy.
The highest number outages were reported in Kingwood, Humble, Galveston and Baytown.
CenterPoint serves 1.9 million customers. The outages included 390,000 customers in Harris County, 50,000 in Chambers County, 41,000 in Galveston County, 30,000 in Fort Bend County and 18,000 in Brazoria County.
CenterPoint planned to begin a damage assessment with a aerial survey by helicopter on Saturday. The company was prepared to dispatch more than 4,000 crews to begin repairs once wind speeds and water levels decline.
High winds, broken tree limbs, other kinds of flying debris, and lightning from thunderstorms associated with the hurricane, caused most of the damage.
Thomas McCann live-blogged into the early morning hours. He writes to say he's been very impressed with CNN's Anderson Cooper and NOAA's Max Mayfield.