Texans are using a ‘Whataburger map’ to track power outages after Beryl

Then Bryan Norton, a 55-year-old tech worker and podcast host, found help from an unlikely source: the Whataburger app.

The app’s map showed where its restaurants — which have a massive presence throughout Houston — were still open. Instead of giving Texans information on where to grab burgers, cookies and taquitos, Norton soon realized that the map could be used to gauge where power was still on in the city or had been restored.

His discovery went viral after he posted about it on social media, with thousands appreciating it for helping them find out if their loved ones had power or how they could escape the extreme heat as temperatures and levels of humidity increased.

“The fact that Whataburger’s app is giving us that little bit of hope — well, it doesn’t get much more Texas than that,” Norton told The Washington Post.

Norton’s eureka moment occurred during a late-night forage hunt. His home in Tomball, Tex., a town about 35 miles north of downtown Houston, lost power around 7 a.m. Monday after Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 storm, downing power lines and fell tree. His backup generator soon sprung to life, lighting up the house and powering a refrigerator that held the barbecue enthusiast’s many pounds of meat. The internet, however, went down that afternoon.

Although he and his wife had planned to sit down for a few days, Norton said they didn’t want to “go completely crazy.” That night, they decided to check for open restaurants — a search that led Norton to a restaurant chain that “tastes like my childhood memories,” he said.

He downloaded the Whataburger app, where the only restaurant in Tomball showed up open, making Norton a little skeptical. That’s why he expanded his search to the entire Houston area — and soon saw a patchwork of grays and oranges, with recent logos marking open Whataburgers.

“You could see like this wave of all gray and some orange, and they changed little by little,” Norton said. “I was like, ‘Holy cow! Now we can see the extent of the matter.’ Obviously, it’s not a perfect tool, but it’s pretty solid.”

After Norton posted about it on X, it quickly spread on social media and was shared on neighborhood pages and family group chats. Users found that an open Whataburger signaled that nearby gas stations or convenience stores might also have power — a useful tracking service at a time when utility company CenterPoint Energy’s power recovery map was down.

As of Wednesday evening, CenterPoint’s website shows power has been restored to more than a million customers, down from a peak of about 2.26 million on Monday. About 40 percent of Whataburger’s 165 locations throughout the Houston area are open.

A spokesperson for CenterPoint said in a statement to The Post that its outage map has been unavailable since a devastating storm in May led to “technical challenges” as customers flooded the site. There are plans to replace the map with a “redesigned cloud-based platform” by the end of July, the spokesperson added.

“We recognize the concern for our customers and will continue to provide updated information about outages,” the statement added.

The scale of the outages and the lack of a tracking map has frustrated residents in the country’s fourth-largest city. For Carliss Chatman, a professor of business law at Southern Methodist University, the case has raised questions about Houston’s readiness.

“I can start my car from my phone anywhere in the world, but CenterPoint can’t tell me where it’s out of power?” Chatman said. “Like, you’re telling me a burger place has better outage information than a utility company?”

Like many Houstonians, Chatman spent much of Tuesday trying to check on her loved ones. Everyone, she said, had the same burning question: “When will my power come back?”

Chatman was introduced to the Whataburger app after a friend shared a post about Norton’s scam. When she saw a Whataburger near her house was open even though her house was still without power, she thought the hack didn’t work.

However, within 10 minutes, her electricity was restored. She said she compared her friends’ zip codes to the Whataburger map and found it was “really accurate” in showing whether areas had power.

When Michelle Guillot Thibodeaux, 49, heard about what’s now being called the “Watt-aburger Map” or “Whataburger Adaptation,” she used it to test whether her Airbnb properties in Galveston still had power. After seeing that the two Whataburgers in the area were marked as closed, she said she assumed the power in the area was still out.

“It’s crazy and incredibly ironic that we’re relying on a Texas staple like Whataburger to show us where the electricity is,” Thibodeaux said. “But people are resourceful and they will do whatever they have to do to prove where the power is.”

Ed Nelson, president and CEO of Whataburger, said the company is pleased that Houstonians have found the app useful. However, he cautioned that it should “be used only as a general idea of ​​energy availability”.

It’s not the first time a restaurant chain has been mentioned during storm emergencies. When disaster strikes on the East Coast, even the Federal Emergency Management Agency is known to rely on what’s 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’s closed — conditions are considered serious.

Perhaps fittingly, one of the few places still operating near Thibodeaux’s Galveston properties was the Waffle House, she said.