AUSTIN, Texas (CBSDFW.COM/AP) A cool blast of winter weather in the US plunged Texas into an extremely icy emergency on Monday, February 15, shutting down power to more than 2 million people and shutting down grocery stores and dangerous snow roads.
The slow thawing and more icy lows ahead also require the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in Texas.
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The deteriorating conditions have halted the delivery of COVID-19 vaccine shipments, prompting some Texas suppliers to search for doses that expire within hours.
State health officials said Texas, which would receive more than 400,000 additional vaccine doses this week, now does not expect deliveries to take place at least Wednesday.
But with doses already at the end, Rice University suddenly began offering vaccines on the closed campus in Houston on Monday.
Harris Health System told the school it had about 1,000 vaccines that were “going to go away” and asked if the school could get opportunists, University spokesman Doug Miller said.
“The window was only open for a few hours. They need to take care of that quickly, ”Miller said.
Temperatures in the single digits to the south of San Antonio, and homes that had been without electricity for hours, had no certainty about when the lights and heat would burn again, as the state’s overwhelming power network in rotating suffocated power outages. is usually seen only in the summers of 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius).
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The storm was part of a massive system that brought snow, sleet and ice rain to the southern plains and spread across the Ohio Valley and to the northeast. The Southwest Power Pool, a group of utilities in 14 states, called for disruptions because the supply of reserve energy was depleted. Some utilities said they start with power outages, while other customers have requested to reduce power consumption.
“We are experiencing a very historic event that is currently taking place,” said Jason Furtado, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, pointing to the whole of Texas under a winter storm warning and the extent of the freezing point.
In Houston, where provincial leaders have warned that the freeze could cause problems on the scale of massive hurricanes hitting the Gulf Coast, one electric supplier said power could only be restored in some homes on Tuesday.
“It simply came to our notice then. We all know who lives here, ”said Dan Woodfin, senior director of systems operations at the Texas Electricity Trust Board. He defends the preparations made by network operators and describes the demand for the system as record-breaking.
‘This event was much more than the design parameters for a typical, or even an extreme, Texas winter that you would normally plan for. And that’s really the result we’re seeing, ” Woodfin said.
President Joe Biden also declared a state of emergency in Texas in a statement Sunday night. The statement is intended to add federal aid to state and local response efforts.
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