In Search of Power, Texans Ask: Are the Lights on at Whataburger?

Want to find a working gas station, an open restaurant or someplace with air-conditioning in East Texas after Hurricane Beryl knocked out power to millions on Monday? Users on Houston-area Facebook pages and group chats have suggested checking Whataburger’s online map to see which locations of the homegrown fast-food chain are operating.

Think: Watt-aburger.

That’s what Jais Curry, who has lived in the Houston area for a decade, did when she had to figure out how to feed a crew of 20 cement workers on Tuesday. She looked at the map and headed where “there was a pretty decent concentration of Whataburgers” open. (Her go-to order is a patty melt with spicy ketchup, but she ended up someplace else on Tuesday: “Crazy line.”)

There’s precedent for using restaurant chains to navigate disaster zones. Craig Fugate, a head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Barack Obama, once said: “If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work.” The concept is known as the “Waffle House index,” and has even been studied by academics — really.

People in Houston started turning to the Whataburger map as a proxy for where the lights were on — or at least joked about doing so on social media — because the city’s primary energy provider, CenterPoint Energy, has been able to share only basic information about outage numbers online, and no map showing where power has been restored.

“You shouldn’t have to resort to a fast-food restaurant app to get information about power,” said Michelle Thibodeaux, who manages Airbnb properties on Galveston Island south of Houston. (A breakfast person, her usual order is the taquitos.)

CenterPoint’s website showed about 1.6 million customers without power by Tuesday afternoon, down from more than two million on Monday. The utility said that its outage map was offline because of technical issues stemming from the May storm that brought destructive winds and heavy rain to Houston. The utility hopes to have a new platform online by the end of July, it said.