HOUSTON – Halfway through the week that Texas froze, everything seemed to be in icy chaos.
Some houses had no water at all, while others saw it flowing from pipes that burst in their corridors and lounges. In Galveston, where dozens were hanging out in a provincial heating center on Monday and Tuesday, refrigerated trucks were the latest need to hold on to the bodies that would be found in the coming days. And on Wednesday, more than 2.5 million people were still without power, while at least twice as many people were told to boil their water.
The onslaught of winter was far from over. In central Texas, where many roads have been impassable for days, another downpour of snow and sleet was expected until late Wednesday night. It is predicted that the new storm will move to the Mid-Atlantic and hit parts of North Carolina and Virginia that have been operating under the ice since the last storm.
In Houston, Catherine Saenz and her family, like most of their neighbors, have had no power or water for days because the city remains in the grip of the fiercest winter in memory. But they are happy: they have a fireplace.
Even fireplaces need to be fed, and in order not to freeze the two parents, two daughters and two grandmothers, her husband spent hours in the afternoon searching for the trees and rotten wood.
“I never thought we would be in this situation,” said Ms Saenz, who grew up in Colombia but lived in Houston through Hurricanes Ike and Harvey. “Nobody is prepared, it’s dangerous and we are very vulnerable.”
As the storm moved eastward, Duke Energy warned its customers in the Carolinas that there could be a million power outages in the coming days. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has issued a similar warning, urging residents to keep their phones charged and prepare for the coming snow and ice.
At least 31 people nationwide have already died since the harsh winter weather began last week. Some died in accidents on icy roads, others succumbed to the cold and others died when desperate attempts to find heat became deadly.
Homes across the country were still without power – more than 150,000 outages in Oregon, 111,000 in Louisiana and 88,000 in Kentucky as of Wednesday afternoon – but nowhere was it as bad as in Texas. The Texas Electric Reliability Board, which manages the state’s power grid, Said Wednesday that about 700,000 homes had electricity repaired overnight, but that more than 2.6 million customers were still without power. The Houston mayor’s office posted on Twitter on Wednesday that the power outages there are likely to last for a few more days.
Gov. Greg Abbott told a news conference Wednesday that there is a shortage of power in the power grid. “Every power source for which the state of Texas has been compromised,” Mr. Abbott said, from coal and renewable energy to nuclear power.
He on Wednesday signed an executive order ordering the supply of natural gas suppliers to stop all gas transportation outside the state, and ordering them to direct sales to generators in Texas instead.
W. Nim Kidd, head of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said several state agencies worked together to meet the demands of nursing homes, hospitals and dialysis centers, which reported a variety of problems, including water disruptions and oxygen deficiencies. As another storm set in, the state increased the number of heating centers to more than 300.
Water has also emerged as a major problem, with nearly seven million Texans appearing under boiling water advice, and about 263,000 people affected by non-functioning water providers.
The crisis has highlighted a deeper warning for power systems across the country. Electrical grids can be designed to handle a wide range of serious conditions, as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will experience new and extreme weather conditions that go beyond the historical conditions for which the grids were designed, putting the systems at risk of catastrophic failure.
In a sign of how fundamental the needs are in Texas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency also sent blankets, bottled water and meals, in addition to 60 generators, to help the state force ‘critical infrastructure’ such as hospitals. FEMA will also supply the state with diesel to ensure the continued availability of backup power, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a briefing on Wednesday.
“Our team and FEMA are monitoring the situation in Texas, as well as other states in the storm’s path that could potentially be affected,” she said. Psaki said. “We remain in close contact with states in the area concerned to ensure that federal support requirements are met.”
Despite a hard experience with natural disasters like hurricanes, it was a whole new kind of misery in Texas, all the more upsetting because it was so unknown. Jason Spencer, a spokesman for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, has three times entered the normal rate in 911 and other law enforcement lines, from people desperately seeking advice on cracked pipes, asking what the symptoms of hypothermia may be or just to look for a little relief from the bitter cold.
Emergency workers, many of whom leave their families in frozen and powerless homes, have had to respond to calls for help by navigating dangerously icy roads. Some of the most dire situations will only be learned in the coming days.
“We fully expect that when things start to thaw and people start investigating each other, that we will find people who did not come through the storm,” he said. Spencer said. “We responded to death calls, we had suicide, and we had at least one homeless person who we think died of hypothermia.”
But according to him, it is probably ‘just the tip of the iceberg’.
That disasters do not fall evenly on rich and poor is a lesson Texans have learned from the past, and it seems to be no longer true this week.
“I understand that we live in a less caring environment, but we are human like everyone else,” said Justin Chavez, who has been living with his wife and eight children in a powerless home in San Antonio for days.
Since Sunday night, his family gathers at night by the light of tea candles, cooks Hot Pockets on a gas stove and blocks the ice-cold drafts with towels tucked under the front and back doors. The children were exhausted. Mr. Chavez, 33, was standing in the backyard Wednesday morning watching his three dogs and a porpoise rummage in the snow. The four fish that the family kept froze to death.
“The city must have been on top of this,” he said. Chavez said. “What do I pay my taxes for?”
People who are desperate for light and warmth have searched in vain for hotels, even though many of the hotels are in the same predicament – powerless, short of food – as the houses around them. And where there is power, rooms are almost impossible to get through.
“I went through Katrina, I went through Harvey, and it’s by far the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Brent Shives, the assistant general manager at a Hilton Garden Inn in Austin, where reception staff said said, faced a steady stream of desperate people seeking refuge. ‘I had to turn away a mother with her 7-month-old child. They had no power or water at home. I had to go back to my office and cry. ”
If there are no hotel rooms, there are the rooms of friends, neighbors and family members.
Since the week began, three families, along with Andrea Chacin and her husband, have moved into their small two-story home in the Heights area of Houston. They came because her house still had power. Under the circumstances, the fear of Covid-19 just had to be put aside.
But then the water stopped in me. Chacin’s house only.
So the eight adults plus one baby in her house try to turn up visits, and they rinse off with water collected from outside or from the waning reservoir in the bath. It got very tiring, she said.
“It’s not just you,” she said. “You’re still accepting the situation of everyone else around you.” Me. Chacin spoke of her grandparents, who are in their 90s and have lost power in their home in the Houston suburbs. They were stranded by the icy roads, so they slept on a bench in front of the fireplace.
“I think we have the right to be angry,” she said. “Why do you have to wait until things happen, and things go wrong?”
Maria Jimenez Moya reported from Houston, Campbell Robertson of Pittsburgh, and Allyson Waller of Conroe, Texas. Reporting was contributed by Marina Trahan Martinez of Austin, Texas, James Dobbins of San Antonio, Marie Fazio of Jacksonville, Fla., Will Wright and John Schwartz of New York, and Brad Plumer of Washington.