In the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl, later classified as a tropical storm, over two million Houston residents were left without power this Tuesday. In wake of continuous outages, when a lack of readily-accessible outage map trackers, residents have resorted to using the Whataburger mobile app to map Houston power outages.
Use of the app is pretty straightforward. Whether or not the location service is enabled, users can view a map of the 127 or so Whataburgers in the Houston area. Those that are open are displayed with the logo in its traditional orange color while those out of service, otherwise without power, are displayed in grey logos.
The Whataburger locations displayed with orange logos are consistent with neighborhood Houston power outages, revealing which areas have power restored.
A user named “eyefearnobeer” wrote in a post: “When your power company can’t produce an outage map [Whataburger] has your back… still lots of greyed out flying Ws unfortunately.”
Those who are simply in need of burgers, fries, and/or face-sized milkshakes are advised to call ahead beforehand, as users have found that some Whataburger locations advertised as open are actually closed.
At the time of this article, 1 pm on Tuesday, the app displayed a “System Error” message. It’s probable that the app isn’t functioning as well due to its high use at the moment.
CenterPoint Energy recently published a statement in which it expects to restore power to Houston residents and businesses by the end of day Wednesday. The last update from Entergy, which reported over 200,000 Houston residences affected by power outages, stated that it would take an undisclosed amount of days to restore power.
See also: 22 Houston Cooling Centers Open For Residents Without Power