Bryan Norton, a 55-year-old tech worker and podcast host, then found help from an unlikely source: the Whataburger app.
The app’s map showed where its Houston-based restaurants were still open. Rather than providing Texans with information on where they could buy burgers, cookies and tacos, Norton quickly realized the map could be used to gauge where in the city power was still available or had been restored.
His discovery went viral after he posted it on social media, where thousands of people credited him with helping them find out if their loved ones had electricity or how they could escape the sweltering heat as temperatures and humidity levels soared.
“The fact that the Whataburger app gives us this little bit of hope, well, it doesn’t get more Texan than that,” Norton told The Washington Post.
The Whataburger app functions as a power outage tracker, which is handy since the power company doesn’t display a map.
Still nearly 1.9 million power outages. pic.twitter.com/d8srWmw1oV—Barbecue Bryan (@BBQBryan) July 9, 2024
Norton’s eureka moment came while he was out foraging late one night. His home in Tomball, Texas, about 35 miles north of downtown Houston, lost power around 7 a.m. Monday when Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 storm, knocking down power lines and downing trees. His backup generator quickly kicked in, lighting the house and starting a refrigerator that held the barbecue enthusiast’s many pounds of meat. The internet, however, was out that afternoon.
Although he and his wife planned to take it easy for a few days, Norton said they didn’t want to go “completely crazy.” That night, they decided to check to see if there were any restaurants open, a search that led Norton to a chain restaurant that “tastes like my childhood memories,” he said.
He downloaded the Whataburger app, where the only Tomball restaurant appeared to be open, which made Norton a little skeptical. So he expanded his search to the entire Houston area and soon saw a patchwork of gray and orange Ws, the latter logos indicating open Whataburgers.
“You could see a wave of gray and some orange, and it slowly changed,” Norton said. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh! Now we can see the magnitude of the problem.’ Obviously, it’s not a perfect tool, but it’s pretty robust.”
After Norton posted the information about X, it quickly spread across social media and was shared on neighborhood pages and family group chats. Users found that an open Whataburger would signal that nearby gas stations or stores might also have power — a useful tracking service at a time when electric company CenterPoint Energy’s power restoration map was down.
CenterPoint’s website says power has been restored to more than 1 million customers, up from a peak of 2.26 million on Monday. About 40% of the 165 Whataburger restaurants in the Houston area are open.
A CenterPoint spokesperson told the Post in a statement that its outage map has been unavailable since a destructive storm in May caused “technical issues” as customers flooded the site. It plans to replace the map with a “redesigned cloud platform” by the end of July, the spokesperson added.
“We acknowledge the inconvenience caused to our customers and will continue to provide updated information on the outages,” the statement added.
The scale of the outages and the lack of a tracking map have frustrated residents of the nation’s fourth-largest city. For Carliss Chatman, a business law professor at Southern Methodist University, the problem has raised questions about Houston’s preparedness.
“I can start my car from my phone anywhere in the world, but CenterPoint can’t tell me where the power outage is?” Chatman asked. “You’re telling me a fast food restaurant has better information about power outages than a utility company?”
Like many Houstonians, Chatman spent much of Tuesday trying to catch up with loved ones. All of them, she said, had the same burning question: “When will the power come back?”
Chatman jumped on the Whataburger app after a friend shared a post about Norton’s hack. When she saw that a Whataburger near her was open while her house was still without power, she figured the hack hadn’t worked.
But after 10 minutes, the power came back on. She compared her friends’ ZIP codes to the Whataburger map and found it was “really accurate” in indicating whether areas had power.
When Michelle Guillot Thibodeaux, 49, heard about what has become known as the “Watt-aburger map” or “Whataburger workaround,” she used it to try to determine whether her Airbnb properties in Galveston still had power. After seeing that both Whataburgers in the neighborhood were marked as closed, she said she assumed the power was still out in the neighborhood.
“It’s crazy and incredibly ironic that we have to rely on a Texas staple like Whataburger to tell us where the power is,” Thibodeaux said. “But people are resourceful and they’ll do whatever it takes to try to find out where the power is.”
Ed Nelson, Whataburger’s president and CEO, said the company was pleased that Houstonians found the app useful. He cautioned, however, that it should “only be used as a general idea of electricity availability.”
This isn’t the first time a restaurant chain has been singled out as a disaster relief measure. When disaster strikes the East Coast, even the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) uses what’s become known as the Waffle House Index to gauge the severity of the situation.
Like the Whataburger tracker, if a Waffle House location is red (meaning it is closed), conditions are considered severe.
Perhaps it’s fitting that one of the few places still operating near Thibodeaux’s Galveston properties is the Waffle House, she said.