Hurricane Laura left thousands of Houston-Texans wondering “how could 2020 get worse?” as they prepared for the worst with school closures and evacuations only to realize that we dodged a bullet. The days following the expected arrival of Laura, Houston-area residents saw as neighboring towns, closer to the Louisiana border, suffered the destructive path of the storm.
Hurricane Laura quickly secured a reputation after making landfall. It will go down as the strongest hurricane to hit the state of Louisiana since 1856, also becoming the 7th named storm to strike the U.S. this year.
Brownout; a phrase that has become more common to those in the area due to the unfortunate experience with such strong storms. Over 60,000 residents unexpectedly were without power after the initial hit of Laura. Many were not made aware of this planned outage until an announcement made by Entergy after-the-fact. The power company explained that the power outages were necessary to protect the integrity of the unaffected power transmission line. If this was not done, the lines could have potentially failed, causing everyone connected to the grid to lose power for an extended period.
Not having power posed as a threat to many school districts and their students, especially with schools still depending heavily on online learning. To take precautions and ensure that all students had access to their daily course work, Conroe ISD closed school on the Friday following the brownout. Students once again were given an unanticipated extended break from school. But we were lucky that that’s all it was- a break- while other students not too far from us recover from the aftermath.