DALLAS (AP) – Higher temperatures spread across the southern United States on Saturday, bringing relief to a winter-hardy region with challenging clean-ups and costly repairs from days of extreme cold and widespread power outages.
In the severely hit Texas, where millions of people have been warned to boil tap water before drinking it, the warming is expected to last several days. The thaw has yielded cracked pipes across the region, adding to the list of miserable conditions that have been blamed for more than 70 deaths.
By Saturday afternoon, the sun was out in Dallas and temperatures were close to the 50s. People came forward to walk and jog indoors in neighborhoods after days. Many roads dried up, and the snow melted. Snowman bag.
Linda Nguyen woke up in a hotel room in Dallas on Saturday morning with an assurance she had not had for almost a week: she and her cat were sleeping somewhere with power and water.
Electricity was restored in her apartment on Wednesday. But when Nguyen comes home from work the next night, she gets a soaked carpet. A pipe burst in her bedroom.
“It’s essentially uninhabitable,” said Nguyen, 27, who works in real estate. “Everything is completely destroyed.”
The deaths attributed to the weather include a man in an Abilene health care facility where the lack of water pressure made medical treatment impossible. Officials also reported deaths due to hypothermia, including homeless people and people in buildings without power or heat. Others died in car accidents on icy roads or due to suspected carbon monoxide poisoning.
About half of the deaths reported so far have occurred in Texas., with multiple deaths also in Tennessee, Kentucky, Oregon and a few other southern and midwestern states.
A Tennessee farmer died when he tried to rescue two calves from a frozen pond.
President Joe Biden’s office said on Saturday he had declared a major disaster in Texas, which instructs federal agencies to help with the recovery.
U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, tweeted on Saturday that she helped raise more than $ 3 million for relief. She asked for help for a Houston Food Bank, one of the 12 organizations in Texas that she said would benefit from the donations.
The storms left more than 300,000 people without power across the country on Saturday, many of them in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
More than 50,000 Oregon electricity customers were among those without power, more than a week after an ice storm destroyed the power grid. Portland General Electric hoped to get all services except 15,000 customers back by Friday night. But the utility has discovered additional damage in areas previously inaccessible.
Gov. Kate Brown, Oregon, has ordered the National Guard to go door-to-door in some areas to look after the well-being of residents. What was the worst ice storm in 40 years at its peak, eliminated the power to more than 350,000 customers.
In West Virginia, Appalachian Power was working on a list of about 1,500 places that needed to be repaired, as about 44,000 customers in the state were left without electricity after hurricane-hit ice storms on February 11th and February 15th. More than 3,200 workers trying to get power back online spread their efforts Saturday across the six provinces most affected.
In Wayne County, West Virginia, workers had to replace the same pole three times because trees kept falling on it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott met with lawmakers from both parties on Saturday to discuss energy prices, while Texans are experiencing huge increases in their electricity bills, after wholesale prices skyrocketed while power plants were offline.
“We have a responsibility to protect the Texans from spikes in their energy bills” due to the weather, he said in a statement.
Water misery added misery to people in the South who went days without ice or heat without electricity. Blizzards forced forced eclipses from Minnesota to Texas.
Robert Tuskey was picking up tools in the back of his pickup truck on Saturday afternoon when he was getting ready to fix a water pipe at a friend’s home in Dallas.
“Everything froze,” Tuskey said. “I even had one in my own house … of course I’m lucky to be a plumber.”
Tuskey, 49, said his plumbing business had a stream of requests for help from friends and family with cracked pipes. “I’m going to help another family member,” he said. “I know she has no money at all, but they have no water at all, and they are older.”
In Jackson, Mississippi, most of the city lacked about 161,000 running water, and officials blamed the city’s main pipeline, which is more than 100 years old and not built for icy weather.
The city provided water to flush and drink toilets. But residents had to pick it up, and the elderly and those living on icy roads were left vulnerable.
Inbound and outbound passenger flights at Memphis International Airport resumed on Saturday after all flights were canceled on Friday due to water pressure issues. The issues were not resolved, but airport officials set up temporary toilet facilities.
Prison attorneys said some correctional facilities in Louisiana have alternating electricity and frozen pipes, affecting toilets and showers.
According to Voice of the Experienced, a grassroots organization founded and run by former prisoners, the men were held ill, elderly or not in dormitories, but in cell blocks – small spaces surrounded by concrete walls. The group said one man at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, just south of Baton Rouge, described a thin layer of ice on its walls.
Cammie Maturin said she spoke to men at the 6,300 Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, who were given no extra provision to protect themselves from the cold.
“They don’t give them any extra blankets. No extra something. For them, it is only approved for yourself, ”said Maturin, president of the non-profit HOPE Foundation.
In many areas, water pressure dropped after lines froze and because people had taps dripped to prevent pipes from icing, authorities said.
As of Saturday, 1,445 public water systems in Texas had interrupted, said Toby Baker, executive director of the state commission for environmental quality. Government agencies use mobile laboratories and coordinate to do water testing.
That is higher than 1,300 reporting issues Friday afternoon. But Baker said the number of affected customers has dropped slightly. Most were under orders for boiling water, with 156,000 water services completely missing.
“It looks like we saw some stabilization in the state’s water systems last night,” Baker said.
The thaw Saturday after 11 days of icy temperatures in Oklahoma City left residents with burst water pipes, unusable wells and furnaces shut down by brief power outages.
Rhodes College in Memphis said Friday about 700 residential students are being relocated to hotels in the suburbs of Germantown and Collierville after school bathrooms ceased to function due to low water pressure.
Firefighters extinguished late Friday in a fully occupied 102-room hotel in Killeen, Texas, about 110 miles north of Austin. The hotel’s sprinkler system did not work due to frozen pipes, authorities said on Saturday.
Flames shot from the top of the hotel with four floors, and three people needed medical attention. Displaced guests were taken to a nearby Baptist church.
Texas electricity network operators said the transfer of electricity returned to normal after the historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures caused an increase in demand that strengthened the state’s system.
Minor outages remained, but Bill Magness, president of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said the network could now supply power throughout the system.
Abbott ordered an investigation into the failure of a state known as the US Energy Capital. ERCOT officials made their preparations and the decision to start defending with forced interruptions on Monday as the network reached breaking point.
The power outages led to at least two lawsuits against ERCOT and utilities, including one filed by the family of an 11-year-old boy who allegedly died of hypothermia. The lawsuits allege ERCOT ignored repeated warnings about weaknesses in the state’s power infrastructure.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has also conducted civil investigations into ERCOT and electric utility companies. His investigation is about power outages, emergency plans, energy prices and more related to the winter storm.
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Scolforo reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
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Associated Press Journalist Gillian Flaccus in Portland, Oregon; Ellen Knickmeyer in Oklahoma City; Jim Mustian in New York; Terry Wallace in Dallas; Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix; and Kimberlee Kruesi in Boise, Idaho, contributed.