Anger over Texas’s power grid failing in the face of a record winter freeze is mounting, as millions of residents remained shivering, with no assurances that their electricity and heat – out for 36 hours or longer in many homes – would return.
“I know people are angry and frustrated,” said Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, who woke up to more than 1 million people still without power in his city on Wednesday. “So am I.”
Between 2 and 3 million customers in Texas still had no power, nearly two full days after historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures created a surge in demand for electricity to warm up homes unaccustomed to such extreme lows, buckling the state’s power grid and causing widespread blackouts. Meanwhile, people’s water pipes are bursting and hours long lines have been wrapping around grocery stores as people search for food.
Jasmine Mabute lives in the Bridgeland suburb in north-west Houston. Like many Texans right now, a lack of power and heat isn’t her only concern. Her own water pipes burst on Tuesday, cutting off supply to her home.
“Yesterday my mom called – she’s in the Philippines right now – and she said ‘make sure you fill some pots up with water just in case the water goes out.’ In my head I was like ‘Why would the water even go out?’
“Funnily enough, I took a shower and 30 minutes later and my brother tried to wash his hands and he said that the water was out.”
There is also now an official “boil water” notice in Houston, with concern rising over the quality of drinking water. But people with electrical appliances are not able to boil water due to the lack of power.
The winter weather that has overwhelmed power grids is keeping its grip on the nation’s midsection as well.
At least 20 people have died across the country, some while struggling to find warmth inside their homes. In the Houston area, one family died from carbon monoxide poisoning from car exhaust in their garage; another perished after flames spread from their fireplace.
More than 100 million people live in areas covered on Wednesday by some type of winter weather warning, watch or advisory, as yet another winter storm hits Texas and parts of the southern plains, the National Weather Service said.
Utilities from Minnesota to Texas and Mississippi have implemented rolling blackouts to ease the burden on power grids straining to meet extreme demand for heat and electricity as record low temperatures were reported in city after city.
The weather has also threatened to affect the nation’s Covid-19 vaccination effort. Joe Biden’s administration said delays in vaccine shipments and deliveries were likely. After visiting Milwaukee on Tuesday, Biden said the weather was as “cold as the devil up there”.
The worst US power outages by far, however, have been in Texas, where officials requested 60 generators from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and planned to prioritize hospitals and nursing homes. The state opened 35 shelters to more than 1,000 occupants, the agency said.
The breakdown sparked growing outrage and demands for answers over how Texas, whose Republican leaders as recently as last year taunted California over its rolling blackouts, failed such a big test of a major point of state pride: energy independence.
Amber Nichols, whose north Austin home has had no power since early Monday, said: “We’re all angry because there is no reason to leave entire neighborhoods freezing to death.”
Some also blame the polar vortex, a weather pattern that usually keeps to the Arctic, but is increasingly visiting lower latitudes and staying beyond its welcome. Scientists say global warming caused by humans could be partly responsible for making its southward escapes longer and more frequent.
But the severe winter storm has, among some Republicans, been used to open up a new culture war around the expansion of renewable energy, which is a stated priority of Biden in order to address the climate crisis.
“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, told Fox News about an ambitious but not enacted plan to rapidly phase out fossil fuels. “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states, to make sure that we’ll be able to heat our homes in the wintertime and cool our homes in the summertime.”
Abbott’s attack contradicts the operators of the Texas grid, which is overwhelmingly run on gas and oil, who have confirmed the plunging temperatures caused gas plants to seize up at the same time as a huge spike in demand for heating. Nevertheless, images of ice-covered wind turbines, taken in Sweden in 2014, were shared widely among conservatives on social media as proof of the frailty of clean energy.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman behind the Green New Deal platform, said that Abbott was “blaming policies he hasn’t even implemented for his own failures” while the renewable energy industry also hit back.
“It is disgraceful to see the longtime antagonists of clean power engaging in a politically opportunistic charade misleading Americans,” said Heather Zichal, chief executive of the American Clean Power lobby group.
Abbott seemed to have a more sobering view of the issue in the past day when he called for an investigation of the grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot). His indignation struck a much different tone than just a day earlier, when he told Texans that Ercot was prioritizing residential customers and that power was getting restored to hundreds of thousands of homes.
“This is unacceptable,” Abbott said.
As the politicians squabbled, travel remained ill-advised in much of the nation, with roadways treacherous and thousands of flights canceled. Some of the fatalities involve people dying in their cars in subfreezing temperatures. Many school systems have delayed or canceled face-to-face classes.
Authorities said a fire that killed three young children and their grandmother in the Houston area probably spread from the fireplace they were using to keep warm. In Oregon, authorities confirmed on Tuesday that four people died in the Portland area of carbon monoxide poisoning.
At least 13 children were treated for carbon monoxide poisoning at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth and one parent died of the toxic fumes, hospital officials said.