Water is slowly returning to Texans nearly a week after an unprecedented winter storm led to major power outages and caused millions of water problems. More than 14 million people are still without water or are under notice of boiling water.
“We saw the total population affected by it decrease to about 14.3 million, up from about 14.9 million yesterday,” Toby Baker, executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said on Saturday at a press conference said. Residents without water dropped from 350,000 to about 156,000 overnight, he said.
Public water systems in Texas are a system that has more than 15 connections – a total of about 7,000 systems – that make the return of water to residents primarily a local responsibility, according to Baker. “It’s not necessarily the size of Houston or the size of Austin, it’s also rural connections and rural water systems,” he explained.
Through mobile labs and partnerships with EPA labs, neighboring states and major municipalities, Texas has now identified enough facilities to test samples from the more than 1,000 systems still left under a boiling water notice, according to Baker.
“Right now, we have the ability to handle in the labs the samples needed to lift the boiling water notices,” Baker said.
“My hope is … that we have hit the worst and that we have stabilized, and that it’s just out of the hole we’re in now.”
This morning, Saturday, the storm was linked to at least 27 deaths in the state, and food and safe drinking water were a shortage for many.
Baker said the state has never seen a winter weather event of this magnitude. “We are not the northeast, we are not Minnesota,” he said, calling the storm a “great learning experience.”
“If it happens again in our lifetime, we will be prepared for it,” Baker said.
There has been a call for a ‘complete review’ of the regulations that could leave millions of days without power. Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order that added state of emergency to the state legislature and asked the legislature to investigate ERCOT’s preparation and response to the storm.
Nim Kidd, head of Texas’ emergency management, criticized the state’s lack of reserved drinking water. “There needs to be more places across the state, at the local and state level, where resources are staged or stored before the event,” Kidd said.
“We have a very limited supply at local level of cities with only warehouses full of bottled water owned by the city, or having meals prepared by the local government – usually do not exist,” he said. private sector for our everyday needs. ‘
President Joe Biden declare that Texas is experiencing a major disaster. People in 77 of the state’s 254 provinces will be eligible for federal funding to help with recovery efforts. The aid includes grants for temporary housing and repairs to homes, as well as low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses, the White House said in a statement on Saturday.
Li Cohen reported.