Power Is Still Off for Millions After Winter Storm

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Millions in Texas Without Power After Winter Storm

Millions of Texans are still without power on Tuesday after a deadly winter storm hit a large part of the southern and central parts of the United States.

“It’s pretty bad that, you know, as Texans, we just can’t prepare for cold — every other part of the country, this would have not been even an issue.” “We lost power yesterday morning in the house. It started getting real cold like around two o’clock, and then you got all the blankets out. We tried to all sleep together to keep us warm, come to the cars to keep our phones charged. And then today, when we got up, there was no water.” “Yesterday morning, about 7:55 power went out. Rode it out for most of the day. Been coming out because we have two kids, keeping them warm, and slept here last night, hoping the power would come on this morning. But we have no real update of when it’s going to come on, and our phones barely work, so.” [laughter]

Millions of people remained without power on Tuesday and were anticipating another cold, dark night in the wake of a deadly winter storm that bulldozed its way across the southern and central parts of the United States this week, in places where such perilously frigid conditions tend to arrive just once in a generation.

By late afternoon Tuesday, the storm was moving into eastern Canada, but the damage left behind was severe. Temperatures across the middle of the country had plummeted to lows not felt in a century or more, with measurements of minus 14 in Oklahoma City and minus 20 in Fayetteville, Ark., even as a new winter storm was building in the southern Plains.

At least 23 people have died since winter weather began wreaking havoc last week, some from the cold itself and some from attempts to escape it. And almost four million customers across the country remained without electricity on Tuesday evening, according to PowerOutage.us, which aggregates live power data from utilities.

More than 3.5 million of those outages were in Texas, where many people had been without power for hours or even days in freezing temperatures. State leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, expressed sharp criticism of the operation of the state’s power grid, and the Texas House speaker announced a legislative hearing looking into the widespread power failures.

The disruptions caused problems at water treatment plants, leading to boil water advisories for hundreds of thousands of people across Texas, from Fort Worth down to the Rio Grande Valley. Some customers lost water altogether, forced to flush their toilets with melting snow.

By early Tuesday afternoon, Southwest Power Pool, which manages the electrical grid across 17 Central and Western states, had stopped ordering controlled rolling cutoffs of power service to customers as the energy supply began meeting the extreme demand, a spokesman said.

The storm also severely disrupted the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine, forcing vaccination sites to close across the South and hampering the shipments of doses.

The brutal cold in the middle of the country seemed to defy a trend of ever-milder winters, but the frigid temperatures in Texas could be a consequence of global warming. There is research suggesting that Arctic warming is weakening the jet stream, the high-level air current that circles the northern latitudes and usually holds back the frigid polar vortex.

Large parts of the Central and Southern United States have been plunged into an energy crisis this week with electric grids damaged by frigid blasts of Arctic weather. Millions of Americans are without power amid dangerously cold temperatures.

The grid failures were most severe in Texas, where more than four million people woke up Tuesday morning facing power failures. On Tuesday, Gov. Greg Abbott called for an emergency reform of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, saying the operator of the state’s power grid “has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours.”

Analysts have begun to identify a few key factors behind the grid failures in Texas. Record-breaking cold weather spurred residents to crank up their electric heaters and pushed demand for electricity beyond the worst-case scenarios that grid operators had planned for. At the same time, many of the state’s gas-fired power plants were knocked offline amid icy conditions, and some plants appeared to suffer fuel shortages as natural gas demand spiked nationwide. Many of Texas’ wind turbines also froze and stopped working, although this was a smaller part of the problem.

The resulting electricity shortfalls forced grid operators in Texas to impose rotating blackouts on homes and businesses, starting Monday, to avert a broader collapse of the system. Separate regional grids in the Southwest and Midwest are also coming under serious strain this week.

The crisis highlighted a deeper warning for power systems throughout the country. Electric grids can be engineered to handle a wide range of severe conditions — as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will face novel and extreme weather events that go beyond the historical conditions those grids were designed for, putting the systems at risk of catastrophic failure.

Here’s some good news for storm-battered communities across the United States: The brutal weather that has killed at least 23 people, disrupted vaccine distribution and left millions without power was moving north into Canada late Tuesday night.

Now for more bad news: Frigid air may persist in the Great Plains and Mississippi Valley through midweek, and a new winter storm is expected to sweep across the South and East over the next two days.

“Not anxiously awaiting tonight’s model guidance on the storm forecast to hit Virginia Thursday,” Jim Duncan, a meteorologist at an NBC affiliate in Richmond, Va., said in a Twitter post on Tuesday night. “Being a meteorologist at this time brings no joy, but distress.”

The South is already reeling from a rare cold snap. The temperature in Houston, Texas, on Monday night — 13 degrees — was lower than that in Houston, Alaska. And Oklahoma’s capital on Tuesday experienced its coldest morning since 1899.

That will continue for at least another few days. High temperatures this week will likely be 25 to 40 degrees below average across a swath of the Central and Southern United States, the National Weather Service said.

There will also be more precipitation. As of early Tuesday morning, nearly three-quarters of the continental United States was blanketed in snow, the greatest extent on record since the National Water Center created a database for that in 2003. And the forecast calls for even more snow this week, from the Southern Plains to the Mississippi Valley.

Meteorologists also expect “significant freezing rain” and ice accumulations of half an inch from the Gulf Coast into Tennessee. A long list of winter weather warnings, advisories and watches were in effect on Tuesday evening.

After pummeling the south, the new storm will head through the Ohio Valley, the Mid-Atlantic region and the Northeast by Wednesday or Thursday, the National Weather Service said. Parts of Appalachia may receive up to six inches of snow. Virginia and North Carolina could also face fresh bouts of ice and freezing rain.

It won’t be bitterly cold everywhere, but even places where the snow lets up — in the Deep South and beyond — may face scattered rain showers and isolated thunderstorms.

When Candice Ortbals-Wiser moved to the Lone Star State in June, she never imagined a brutal winter storm that would reduce her to boiling water from melted snow to wash kitchen utensils.

“I was not expecting this level of cold whatsoever,” said Dr. Ortbals-Wiser, who moved from California to Abilene, about 180 miles west of Dallas.

In a state known more for powerful hurricanes than Arctic blasts, the past 48 hours have presented a rude awakening for Texans like Dr. Ortbals-Wiser. The hours of extreme winter weather, with patches of the state left in the cold and dark amid power outages, have exacerbated the loss of basic necessities and compounded the effects of the coronavirus pandemic in a state that has led the nation in daily average cases for the past week.

On Monday evening, Abilene announced it would have to shut off its water supply after all three of its water treatment plants lost power. As of early Tuesday afternoon, city officials said power had been restored to one.

The weather has also presented a conundrum for remote learning and work. Dr. Ortbals-Wiser, who is a political science professor at Abilene Christian University, said that she had to push an exam back for students twice, and that it did not look like even an online exam would be ideal.

“You can’t do all the remote things we’ve learned because of Covid if you don’t have electricity, and it’s not equally available to all students,” Dr. Ortbals-Wiser said. “You can’t leave people out.”

For Zachary Wojahn, who lives in Spring, a suburb of Houston, remote work has not been a possibility without an internet connection. He and his family spent more than 30 hours without power before their electricity came back on Tuesday. He resorted to placing food outside to keep it from spoiling. Mr. Wojahn said a major concern about the weather had been its effect on communication.

“We haven’t gotten any alerts throughout the entire outage,” he said by text message, unable to talk because of his phone’s spotty cellphone service. “Everything we’ve gotten is from family that do not live in the area.”

Greta Kreidner, from Austin, said she and her husband felt as though they have not seen an organized state response to the extreme weather, and their uncertainty has only grown as they continued to hunker down in their living room, doing their best to keep themselves and their two children warm.

“I feel like I’m so numb to disaster at this point,” Ms. Kreidner said.

When the lights went out Monday night in the Alazán-Apache housing project in San Antonio — which stands in one of the city’s poorest ZIP codes — the traffic signals in the neighborhood flickered off and storekeepers pulled down their shutters.

For residents, there was little left to do but huddle under blankets and hope their children would not fall ill.

While the rolling blackouts in Texas have left some four million residents without power in brutally cold weather, experts and community groups say that many marginalized communities were the first to be hit with power outages; if history serves as a guide, they could be among the last to be reconnected. This is particularly perilous, they say, given that low-income households can lack the financial resources to flee to safety, or to rebound after the disruption.

Experts worry, in particular, that rising energy prices amid surging demand will leave many families in the lurch, unable to pay their utility bills next month and triggering utility cutoffs at a time they are at their most vulnerable. In Texas’ deregulated electricity market, prices can fluctuate with demand, leading to a potential jump in electric bills for poorer households that already spend a disproportionate proportion of their income on utilities.

“Whether it’s flooding from severe weather events like hurricanes or it’s something like this severe cold, the history of our response to disasters is that these communities are hit first, and have to suffer the longest,” said Robert Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University and an expert on wealth and racial disparities related to the environment.

The death toll related to the storm that swept across the southern and central United States this week, accompanied by record-breaking cold temperatures, continued to rise on Tuesday.

In Houston, a woman and a girl died from carbon monoxide poisoning after a car was left running in a garage to generate heat, the police said. A homeless man was also found dead at an overpass. And man who was found dead on a median in midtown Houston on Monday was suspected to have died from the extreme cold, the Harris County sheriff said.

A grandmother and three children were killed in a house fire in Sugar Land, Texas, early Tuesday in a neighborhood that was without power, according to local news reports.

In southern Louisiana, a man died after slipping on the ice and hitting his head, officials said, and a 10-year-old boy died in Tennessee after falling into an icy pond. The authorities in San Antonio said that weather conditions contributed to the death of a 78-year-old man.

Slippery roads were responsible for 10 deaths in Kentucky and Texas, including a pileup in Fort Worth that involved more than 100 vehicles and killed six people. In Missouri, a 59-year old man was killed when a snowplow collided with his pick up truck on Monday afternoon.

A person who got out of a vehicle after a car crash in Houston late Monday was struck and killed.

The weather-driven destruction this week did not come solely from ice and snow; in coastal North Carolina, a tornado killed three people and injured at least 10 others early Tuesday morning, though it was unclear if it was meteorologically related to the winter storm.

Two Houston emergency rooms treated about 100 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning over a 16-hour period from Monday to Tuesday — a huge spike, a hospital system spokeswoman said — as residents of the city shivering without power resorted to dangerous methods of keeping warm.

The Houston police said a woman and a girl died after a car was left running in a garage to generate heat, and doctors said they were concerned about running out of treatment options if the rush of patients continued. People with severe cases of carbon monoxide poisoning must be placed into a hyperbaric chamber to receive oxygen, and Houston emergency rooms only have a handful available.

“It’s definitely very alarming,” said Dr. Salil Bhandari, an emergency medicine physician affiliated with the Memorial Hermann hospital at the Texas Medical Center.

Dr. Bhandari and medical staff treated 57 patients late Monday and early Tuesday — half of them children, he said. Twenty-five of those patients needed to spend time in the hyperbaric chamber, Dr. Bhandari said, and it can only treat six at a time.

The hospital typically treats about 75 to 100 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning during an entire year, a spokeswoman said. Although all the patients brought to the emergency rooms survived, the Houston police reported that a woman and a girl died from carbon monoxide poisoning early Tuesday after a car was left running in a garage.

Most of the poisoning cases stemmed from people using generators improperly, often keeping them functioning inside of garages or close to windows, instead of outside, Dr. Bhandari said. Entire families were poisoned in some cases.

“The key is that people are not using generators properly,” he said, adding that a few people had also brought charcoal grills inside their homes.

At Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital and Ben Taub Hospital, hospitals run by Harris Health system, there were a combined 15 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning in the past 24 hours — and at Lyndon B. Johnson, there was at least one death from the poisoning.

The Houston Fire Department responded to more than 90 calls for carbon monoxide poisoning in a 24-hour period, Chief Samuel Peña said at a news conference on Tuesday afternoon. “It’ll punch victims when they least expect it,” he said, “especially in their sleep.”

Mr. Peña said people in Houston were turning on their vehicles to stay warm, and cautioned against doing so inside a garage, even with the door open. There were still about 1.3 million people without power in the Houston region on Tuesday afternoon, Mayor Sylvester Turner said at the briefing.

“This is easily a situation that could overwhelm an emergency department,” Dr. Bhandari said. “That is incredible that nobody died. That is a mass casualty situation.”

As millions of Texans endured their second day of power blackouts caused by a devastating winter storm, Gov. Greg Abbott called for an emergency reform of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, known as ERCOT, saying the operator of the state’s power grid “has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours.”

Mr. Abbott designated his call for an investigation and reform of ERCOT as an emergency item in the current Texas legislative session, putting it on a fast track toward enactment. The announcement came just after the Texas House speaker, Dade Phelan, ordered a Feb. 25 joint committee hearing to investigate ERCOT and determine what “caused the lights to go off across the Lone Star State.”

Both the governor and the House speaker said their goal is to ensure that the conditions never reoccur.

The sharply worded response from two of the state’s top political leaders came amid a fierce public backlash after millions of Texans were left without power following a storm packing record snow and single-digit temperatures late Sunday and Monday.

“Far too many Texans are without power and heat for their homes as our state faces freezing temperatures and severe winter weather,” the governor said. “This is unacceptable.”

As the operator of the state’s power grid, ERCOT has faced high demands for electricity throughout the storm and imposed blackouts to distribute the power burden across the overloaded system. Hundreds of thousands of Texans have gone without power for hours and in many cases well over a day.

Bill Magness, ERCOT’s president and chief executive, said in an interview on Austin’s KXAN-TV on Tuesday that the council was “trying to get people’s power back on as quickly as possible” but at the same time needed to “safely manage the balance of supply and demand on the grid” to avoid larger collapses in the power system.

“As hard as these outages are,” he said, “they avoid a much more catastrophic situation.”

At the national level, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation said on Tuesday they would jointly investigate the blackouts and electric grid failures in the Midwest and South.

The winter storm stretching across much of the United States disrupted distribution of the coronavirus vaccine this week, as clinics giving shots closed and shipments of the vaccine stalled with snow and ice grounding flights and turning highways dangerously slick.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday warned of “widespread delays” in vaccine shipments over the next few days, particularly for those doses coming through major shipment hubs like the FedEx facility in Memphis and the UPS facility in Louisville.

Many of the closures and cancellations were in the South, where the storm was particularly fierce — and where the pace of vaccinations in several states has lagged behind the national average. Vaccine appointments have been rescheduled or canceled from Texas to Kentucky.

“It’s just not safe for people to be out. So we need this to thaw,” Mayor Steve Adler of Austin said Tuesday on CBS. “And then we’re just going to have to redouble our efforts and make sure that the vaccine that we have gets into people’s arms. But for right now, we’re on pause.”

The delays appeared likely to grow in the coming days.

In Missouri, Gov. Mike Parson said on Monday that vaccination distribution efforts run by the state would be brought to a halt through the rest of the week, while in Alabama, hospitals and health departments closed vaccination clinics. In New Hampshire, state officials said vaccinations would be canceled on Tuesday.

In Detroit, Mayor Mike Duggan said the 3,000 vaccination appointments scheduled to be carried out on Tuesday at a downtown convention center downtown would be moved to Saturday.

“We’re going to keep the vaccines going to the maximum extent possible,” Mr. Duggan said, “but we’re also not going to ask people to be put at risk coming down in difficult driving conditions.”

In Houston, officials scrambled to deliver more than 8,400 vaccine doses on Monday after the Harris County Public Health Department building — where these vaccines were being stored— lost power and the backup generator failed, Judge Lina Hidalgo of Harris County said at a news conference.

Officials ended up distributing more than 5,400 of the vaccines to hospitals in the region, to Rice University and to the county jail. After receiving guidance from Moderna, the remaining 3,020 vaccines were re-refrigerated and put back in storage for later administration, Ms. Hidalgo said.

Several animal species have been threatened by record-low temperatures in Texas this week, including about 3,500 sea turtles that were rescued and brought to the relative safety of dry land.

In cold temperatures, turtles can fall victim to a condition called a “cold stun,” when their body temperatures fall so low that they lose their ability to swim, eat or even hold their head above water.

“You could put a cold-stunned turtle in a half an inch of water and they’d drown,” said Wendy Knight, the executive director of Sea Turtle Inc., a nonprofit group in South Padre Island, Texas, that is helping keep the turtles safe until they can return to the water.

Turtles that have been rescued by people on beaches or in boats are being put on plastic-covered pallets and allowed to warm for several days in the South Padre Island Convention Center.

Other animals in Texas have also been affected by the storm. A primate sanctuary in North Bexar County reported the cold-related deaths of a chimpanzee, several monkeys, lemurs and tropical birds, according to The San Antonio Express-News. And the El Paso Zoo found and rehabilitated a frigate — a type of sea bird — after it was blown off course.

Ms. Knight said the scale of the cold stun event for sea turtles was the largest in decades and could have a population-level impact. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, five sea turtle species found in Texas are listed under the Endangered Species Act as “endangered” or “threatened.”

Also at immediate risk are a few dozen turtles housed at the Sea Turtle headquarters, where most are being rehabilitated for injuries. The facility is approaching its third day without power.

A winter storm delivered snow and ice from Seattle to San Antonio this week, bringing frigid temperatures and rolling blackouts to parts of the United States unaccustomed to severe winter weather.

With parts of the country seeing record-setting chilly temperatures — including in places where coats and gloves are rarely needed — power operators and the National Weather Service have been offering tips for how people can conserve energy and stay warm at home, with or without power.

Tim Burke, president and chief executive officer of the Omaha Public Power District, asked his 300,000 residential customers to conserve energy by lowering their thermostat a few degrees, turning off any unused lights, postponing laundry and dishwashing, and unplugging devices that are not currently being used.

In a video announcing planned power outages, he showed that his office thermostat was set to 55 degrees and that there were “no lights on in our offices.”

The National Weather Service in Kansas City, Mo., also shared ways that people can avoid losing heat. They included placing rolled-up towels at the base of exterior doors or stuffing rags in cracks under the doors.

Closing curtains and blinds can also keep heat inside, the Weather Service said.

Residents should also “move all activities to a main room and close the remaining interior doors to retain heat,” the agency said, adding that residents should wear layers of loosefitting and lightweight warm clothing, and have extra clothing layers handy.

To stay warm at home, the Weather Service advises people to light their fireplace, if they have one, and use indoor-safe heaters.

Eating and drinking also warms up the body, but avoid caffeine and alcohol, the Weather Service said. If you have to leave your residence, experts suggest exiting through a garage or porch door to reduce the loss of indoor heat.

The notion that the global phenomenon of a hotter planet could be sending a shocking cold wave into the southern United States might seem nonsensical. And every cold snap can be counted on to elicit quips and stunts from those who deny the science of climate change.

But the weather patterns that send freezing air from the polar vortex plunging all the way to the Gulf Coast could, like other forms of extreme weather, be linked to global warming — which is why the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe prefers the phrase “global weirding.”

Winter storms are influenced by many factors, including the natural variability that affects all weather systems. The planet’s warming could be part of that icy blend, even while climate change is making winters milder over all.

The air that usually sits over the Arctic is now sweeping down South because of changes to the jet stream, the high-level air current that circles the Northern Hemisphere and usually holds back the frigid polar vortex.

Of course, bitter cold from the polar vortex has long been a part of the North American weather picture. Dr. Amy Butler, a research scientist at the NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory, has said that she has yet to find any long-term trend in polar vortex disruptions, which “occur naturally even in the absence of climate change.”

But Judah Cohen, the director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, has identified general trends in winter storms. He was an author of a paper last year in the journal Nature Climate Change that found a sharp increase in Northeast winter storms from 2008 to 2018.

“Severe winter weather is much more frequent when the Arctic is warmest,” Dr. Cohen said, adding, “It’s not in spite of climate change, but related to climate change.”

The current storm “could be one of the most costly natural disasters of the year,” he said, in part because of its unusual geography: “Texas, which is known for hurricanes, is not known for snow and cold damage” like burst water pipes.

Hundreds of migrants at a makeshift refugee camp on the southwestern border shivered through the night inside their tents, wrapped in donated blankets, as light snow fell and the temperature hovered around 20 degrees through the early hours of Tuesday.

“We’re trying to protect ourselves. It’s just freezing here,” said a migrant from Nicaragua named Perla, who lives with her daughter and two grandchildren at the encampment in Matamoros, just across the international bridge that connects Mexico to Brownsville, Texas.

Some migrants burned charcoal and wood to stay warm when the sun came up, according to descriptions from people at the camp. Most huddled inside their small tents or tarp-sided dwellings, while volunteer groups delivered sweaters, coats and blankets.

About 1,000 people applying for asylum in the United States have been stranded at the camp since the Trump administration introduced a policy in 2019 requiring asylum applicants to wait in Mexico for their immigration court hearings. Last year, officials sealed the border amid the coronavirus epidemic.

The low temperatures froze one of the major sources of drinking water at the camp, but a truck arrived Tuesday with water jugs. A group called Sidewalk School provided two propane heaters on Monday and planned to scatter four more around the encampment this week.

“Children have been crying because they are so cold,” said Felicia Rangel, the group’s founder.

A white school tent, where children gather for educational activities, was blown off its metal frame by the wind, Ms. Rangel said.

By Tuesday afternoon, the temperature had climbed above 30 degrees, and some boys played soccer on the basketball court in the heart of the camp.

Global Response Management, a nonprofit that runs a clinic in the camp, conducted tent checks and found no cold weather injuries such as frost bite.

“These people are used to harsh conditions. They’re very resilient,” said Sam Bishop, the nonprofit’s project coordinator. “But this inclement weather is a reminder that they need to get across, and processed for asylum like they deserve under international law.”

It was colder across much of Texas on Monday than it was in Maine.

Houston hit a record low for a Feb. 15 of 17 degrees, breaking the previous record of 18 degrees, set in 1905. In Austin, it was just 8 degrees, breaking the previous record of 20 degrees, set in 1909. Records for the date also fell in San Antonio (9 degrees) and Dallas (7 degrees).

And the frigid blast shows no signs of letting up. The National Weather Service warned that arctic air and dangerous wind chills would remain over the central part of the United States this week, breaking even more records.

The bitter cold has broken records that had stood for decades, from the Canadian border to the Gulf Coast. In Hibbing, Minn., on Monday, the temperature plunged to minus 38 degrees, beating the previous record of minus 32, set in 1939.

In North Platte, Neb., it was minus 29, dipping below the previous record of minus 23 set more than a century ago, in 1881. Residents in Norfolk, Neb., were dealing with a reading of minus 31 degrees, breaking a record there from 1924. In Oklahoma City, it was minus 6, also a record.