Hurricane Beryl had pummeled Southeast Texas on Monday, leaving millions in the Houston area without power. But with technical issues plaguing the tracker for the city’s main energy provider, there was no way to check the status of power outages — or find the still-lit pockets where residents could buy food, gas and other necessities.
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 across Houston — were still open. Instead of providing Texans with info about where they could snag burgers, biscuits and breakfast tacos, Norton soon noticed the map could be used to gauge where power in the city was still on or had been restored.
His discovery went viral after he posted about it on social media, where thousands credited him with helping them find out if their loved ones had power or how they could escape the sweltering heat as temperatures and humidity levels soared.
“The fact that Whataburger’s app is giving us that bit of hope — well, it doesn’t get more Texas than that,” Norton told The Washington Post.
Norton’s eureka moment happened during a late-night hunt for food. His home in Tomball, Tex. — a town some 35 miles north of Houston’s center — lost power around 7 a.m. on Monday as Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 storm, toppling transmission lines and knocking down trees. His backup generator soon whirred to life, illuminating the house and kick-starting a fridge holding the barbecue enthusiast’s many pounds of meat. The internet, however, went down that afternoon.
Though he and his wife had planned to hunker down for a few days, Norton said they didn’t want to go “completely stir 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 one restaurant in Tomball appeared open, making Norton a little skeptical. That’s why he widened his search to the whole Houston area — and soon saw a patchwork of gray and orange Ws, where the latter logos marked the open Whataburgers.
“You could see like this whole wave of gray and a couple of orange, and they changed little by little,” Norton said. “I was like, ‘Holy cow! Now we can see the scope of the issue.’ 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 stores might also have power — a useful tracking service at a time when utility company CenterPoint Energy’s power-restoration map was down.
Hurricane Beryl had pummeled Southeast Texas on Monday, leaving millions in the Houston area without power. But with technical issues plaguing the tracker for the city’s main energy provider, there was no way to check the status of power outages — or find the still-lit pockets where residents could buy food, gas and other necessities.
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 across Houston — were still open. Instead of providing Texans with info about where they could snag burgers, biscuits and breakfast tacos, Norton soon noticed the map could be used to gauge where power in the city was still on or had been restored.
His discovery went viral after he posted about it on social media, where thousands credited him with helping them find out if their loved ones had power or how they could escape the sweltering heat as temperatures and humidity levels soared.
“The fact that Whataburger’s app is giving us that bit of hope — well, it doesn’t get more Texas than that,” Norton told The Washington Post.
Norton’s eureka moment happened during a late-night hunt for food. His home in Tomball, Tex. — a town some 35 miles north of Houston’s center — lost power around 7 a.m. on Monday as Beryl made landfall as a Category 1 storm, toppling transmission lines and knocking down trees. His backup generator soon whirred to life, illuminating the house and kick-starting a fridge holding the barbecue enthusiast’s many pounds of meat. The internet, however, went down that afternoon.
Though he and his wife had planned to hunker down for a few days, Norton said they didn’t want to go “completely stir 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 one restaurant in Tomball appeared open, making Norton a little skeptical. That’s why he widened his search to the whole Houston area — and soon saw a patchwork of gray and orange Ws, where the latter logos marked the open Whataburgers.
“You could see like this whole wave of gray and a couple of orange, and they changed little by little,” Norton said. “I was like, ‘Holy cow! Now we can see the scope of the issue.’ 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 stores might also have power — a useful tracking service at a time when utility company CenterPoint Energy’s power-restoration map was down.