Power outages in Texas dropped below 1 million on Thursday morning for the first time in four days, but millions were still without safe water after a historic storm now being blamed for more than 30 deaths.
As of early Thursday, more than 600,000 homes and businesses were still without electricity in the Lone Star State — down from about 3 million the day before and an earlier peak of more than 4 million.
But Texas’ grid manager has warned that the early-morning low could rise during hours of peak energy demand.
Many Texans rising to find power still have the misery of not having safe drinking water, if any water at all as pipes across the state have frozen.
It has particularly devastated some hospitals, forcing people to refrain from washing their hands despite it being the most basic safety measure, especially the coronavirus pandemic.
Texas officials ordered 7 million people — a quarter of the population of the nation’s second-largest state — to boil tap water before drinking it. Gov. Greg Abbott urged residents to shut off water to prevent more busted pipes and preserve pressure in municipal systems.
The weather also disrupted water systems in several Southern cities, including in New Orleans and Shreveport, Louisiana, where city fire trucks delivered water to several hospitals, and bottled water was being brought in for patients and staff, Shreveport television station KSLA reported.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards sought a presidential emergency declaration Wednesday evening, seeking federal money and supplies in response to extended power outages in his state.
The historic extreme weather across large swathes of the US has now been blamed for the deaths of more than 30 people, The Associated Press said.
Officials suspect many more people have died — but their bodies have not been discovered yet.
Some perished while trying to keep warm inside their homes. In the Houston area, one family succumbed to carbon monoxide from car exhaust in their garage. A grandmother and three children died when flames escaped the fireplace they were using to keep warm.
“This is in many ways disasters within the disaster,” said Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Harris County, which encompasses Houston. “The cascading effects are not going to go away.”
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), a cooperative responsible for 90% of the state’s electricity, claimed “progress” in getting power back on the grid, but the historic cold snap that crippled it will leave freezing temperatures for several more days, meteorologists warn.
The most severe parts of the storm were finally moving away from the Lone Star State, weather watchers said.
“The worst is over and things will be getting better through the weekend,” Dan Petersen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland, said.
Texas has been hit hardest, but many other states have also suffered. In Oregon, more than 100,000 customers remained without power Thursday after the worst damage to the power system in 40 years, Portland General Electric (PGE) said.
“These are the most dangerous conditions we’ve ever seen in the history of PGE,” said Dale Goodman, director of utility operations, who declined to predict when all customers would have power restored.
Utilities from Minnesota to Texas have implemented rolling blackouts to ease the burden on strained power grids.
The Southwest Power Pool, a group of utilities covering 14 states, said the blackouts were “a last resort to preserve the reliability of the electric system as a whole.”
With Post wires
