More than 150,000 Americans still without power after Memorial Day storms batter southern states

• More than 150,000 households remain without power after Memorial Day storms, with Texas and Louisiana hit hardest.
• Texas suffered 125,000 outages, mostly in Houston, leaving residents in dangerous heat, while Louisiana’s Entergy cut power to 100,000 to prevent total grid failure.
• Mississippi faces prolonged blackouts, with officials warning repairs could take days as crews battle severe weather forecasts.
• Critics blame decades of infrastructure neglect, with aging grids failing under extreme weather, echoing Texas’ 2021 winter crisis.
• Families, hospitals, and businesses struggle without electricity, raising concerns over utility companies prioritizing profits over public safety.

The fragility of America’s power infrastructure was laid bare once again this week as more than 150,000 households across the South remained without electricity following devastating Memorial Day weekend storms.

Texas bore the brunt of the outages, with more than 125,000 customers, primarily in the Houston area, struggling in the sweltering heat. Meanwhile, Louisiana’s utility company Entergy made the drastic decision to cut power to more than 100,000 customers on Sunday to prevent a total grid collapse.

With Mississippi also grappling with prolonged blackouts and officials warning of multi-day restoration efforts, this crisis serves as a reminder of how dangerously dependent we are on an aging, unreliable electrical system that governments and corporations have neglected for decades.

A preventable disaster

The storms, which swept through the South with violent winds and torrential rain, didn’t just knock down power lines; they exposed the systemic rot in America’s energy infrastructure. While natural disasters are inevitable, the cascading failures they trigger are not. Much of the U.S. power grid relies on decades-old technology, leaving it vulnerable to extreme weather events that are becoming increasingly common. In Texas, where deregulation and poor maintenance have long been criticized, residents faced a grim sense of déjà vu after the 2021 winter grid failure. This time, the culprit wasn’t freezing temperatures but a storm season that utility companies were woefully unprepared to handle.

Louisiana’s situation was even more dire. Entergy, the state’s largest utility provider, proactively shut off power to over 100,000 customers on Sunday in a move they described as necessary to avoid a wider collapse. While the tactic may have spared the grid from total failure, it left families, hospitals, and businesses scrambling in the dark, raising serious questions about why such drastic measures were needed in the first place.

Behind every outage number is a real person—a parent trying to keep food from spoiling, a senior reliant on medical equipment, or a small business owner watching their inventory perish. In Houston, where temperatures soared into the 90s, residents without air conditioning faced dangerous conditions. In Louisiana, Entergy’s decision to cut power left many questioning whether profit-driven utility giants are prioritizing their bottom lines over public safety.

Mississippi, too, saw significant disruptions, with officials warning that repairs could take days. The state’s emergency management agency emphasized that crews were working around the clock, but with more severe weather forecasted, progress could be slow. For rural communities, where infrastructure is often the most neglected, the wait for restoration could stretch even longer.

A failing system

The recurring theme in these disasters is the failure of leadership, both corporate and governmental, to modernize the power grid. While trillions are wasted on woke ESG initiatives and foreign wars, the basic systems that keep Americans safe and productive are left to decay. The Texas grid, for example, has faced repeated warnings about its vulnerability, yet lawmakers have done little to mandate weather or invest or invest in reliable alternatives. Similarly, Entergy’s reliance on preemptive blackouts suggests a grid operating on the edge of collapse, with no real long-term solutions in sight.

This isn’t just a Southern problem. Across the nation, aging transformers, outdated transmission lines, and bureaucratic inertia have created a ticking time bomb. The American Society of Civil Engineers has consistently given the U.S. energy infrastructure a dismal grade, citing decades of underinvestment. Yet instead of addressing these failures, politicians and corporate elites distract the public with divisive cultural battles while the foundations of modern life crumble.

Sources for this article include:

DailyMail.co.uk

Newsweek.com

NYTimes.com

APNews.com