More than 4 million Texans went to sleep without heat on Monday night because record low temperatures brought a demand for power with which the state’s electrical network could not keep up and if another big storm focused on a large part of the central part of the country on Tuesday.
The storm that dropped snow and ice from Arkansas to Indiana – and brought record low temperatures from Oklahoma City to the Iron Range of Minnesota, where thermometers dropped to minus 38 – expected to move northeast in Tuesday, the National Weather Service said.
Snow, sleet and ice are expected from the Ohio Valley to Pennsylvania and Maine, the forecaster said.
In Texas, 4.3 million homes and businesses were without power Monday night, with the hardest hit area around Galveston and Houston, according to poweroutage.us.
Forecasters warned that the region could see the coldest night in thirty years when officials pleaded with residents to stay off the roads, save power and lock the windows and doors.
“I will not pretend it is going to be a difficult night,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo told reporters on Monday. “We will look at and respond to emerging crises and let’s go through them together.”
Among the crises the country has already dealt with was a power outage – and the subsequent failure of a backup generator – at the Department of Public Health, where more than 8,000 doses of coronavirus vaccine were kept in cold rooms, Hidalgo said.
Thousands of doses were sent immediately to Harris County Jail, Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital, Rice University and elsewhere, she said.
Images of the school showed dozens of shivering students waiting for their shots.
“I literally dropped everything, tackled everything here and jumped here, and apparently everyone has the same thought as me,” one student told NBC affiliate KPRC.
According to law enforcement, two men were found dead along the roads in Houston. Causes of death were pending, but officials said the freezing temperature could be to blame.
Elsewhere in Texas, San Antonio International Airport canceled all flights scheduled for Tuesday, and the Dallas Stars delayed a National Hockey League game against the Nashville Predators in an effort to save energy.
The Houston Chronicle, meanwhile, had to stop producing its print edition after the plant lost power at 2 p.m. In a note to subscribers, the newspaper said it had not even happened when the city was hit by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Power outages forced Abilene, a city of about 170,000, to suspend its water service.
In an effort to save power, officials in Dallas said their skyline would darken, and Kansas City did the same.
Kansas City, Missouri, like cities scattered across the U.S., including Tennessee and Iowa, is threatened with looming power outages. The Southwest Power Pool, a group of utilities in 17 states, called for interruptions because the reserve energy was depleted.
The Northwest Pacific was hit by a weekend storm and faced long-running problems Monday, with hundreds of thousands of people in Oregon still in the dark after heavy snow and ice blew down the weekend branches and storm drains in Washington state and Idaho blocked. to raise concerns about floods.
Nearly 5,000 power lines were torn down by ice and tree shoots and several transmission lines were severely damaged by the storm that passed through.
The National Weather Service said the next storm would move Tuesday from the Rockies to the southern plains, bringing icy rain to eastern Texas and Louisiana and bringing as much as 8 inches of snow to parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas and southern Missouri.
The Associated Press contributed.