Power began to flicker back in Texas on Thursday, four days after a powerful winter storm overwhelmed the state’s electric grid, bringing life in America’s second largest state to a staggering halt, Reuters reported.
But the crisis seemed far from over as thousands of homes remain without energy because of downed lines and other issues due to the inclement weather.
About 3,25,000 homes and businesses remained without power in Texas on Thursday, down from about 30 lakh a day earlier, though officials said limited rolling blackouts were still possible, according to AP.
The storms also left more than 4,50,000 people from West Virginia to Louisiana without power and 1,00,000 in Oregon were still enduring a week-long outage following a massive ice and snow storm.
The head of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid, warned on Thursday that the state was “not out of the woods yet,” and that the cold weather that created the problems would persist through the weekend, reported The New York Times. “We’re still in very cold conditions, so we’re still seeing much higher than normal winter demand,” Bill Magness, the council’s president and chief executive, said at a news conference.
The weather also jeopardized drinking water systems. Authorities ordered as many as 70 lakh people, which is a quarter of the population of Texas, to boil tap water before drinking it, following the record low temperatures that damaged infrastructure and pipes.
Visuals showed water frozen in bath tabs, fish tanks and even beaches.
As of Thursday afternoon, more than 1,000 Texas public water systems and 177 of the state’s 254 counties had reported weather-related operational disruptions, affecting more than 140 lakh people, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
The problem was more acute in hospitals. Two of Houston Methodist’s community hospitals had no running water and still treated patients but cancelled most non-emergency surgeries and procedures for Thursday and possibly Friday, reported AP.
In Jackson, Mississippi, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba told AP most of the city of about 150,000 was without water on Thursday night. Crews were pumping water to refill city tanks but faced a shortage of chemicals to treat the water, she said.
“We are dealing with an extreme challenge with getting more water through our distribution system,” Lumumba said.
Lawmakers face the ire of citizens
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, a cooperative responsible for 90% of the state’s electricity, said on Thursday that it has made “significant progress” in restoring power. However, it did not provide detailed figures.
Angry residents have trained much of their ire on ERCOT, which critics say did not heed warnings after a cold-weather meltdown in 2011 to ensure that Texas’ energy infrastructure, which relies primarily on natural gas, was winterized.
Critics have also raised questions about the leadership of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has called for an investigation of ERCOT. “What happened this week to our fellow Texans is absolutely unacceptable and can never be replicated again,” Abbott said at an afternoon news conference.
United States Senator Ted Cruz too came under fire for flying to the Mexican resort city of Cancun with his family despite the storm’s fallout. The Republican lawmaker cut his trip short after his travels were reported, saying he would return to Texas and “get to the bottom of what happened” in his state.
Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Harris County, which encompasses Houston, said the number of homes without power in her county had fallen. “It’s definitely a big positive that the power is back on for most of the residents,” Hidalgo told Reuters. “It’s been a miserable few days, a really tragic few days.”
Meanwhile, American President Joe Biden said that he spoke to Abbott to discuss the situation in Texas and identify ways to support the state’s recovery from the storm. “I made clear to the Governor that I will work relentlessly to get his state what they need,” Biden wrote on Twitter.
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