SAN ANTONIO – Eight million Texans boiled water to make it safe to drink on Tuesday, while platoons of plumbers and engineers struggled to repair the damage caused to countless homes and businesses by a cruel winter storm.
Many Texans also faced food shortages when supermarkets tried to stock up, large crowds fell into food pantries and the pandemic continued to threaten a state where, according to the latest NBC News data, almost 43,000 people died from Covid-19 and 2.6 million people have been infected.
About 24,000 people were left without running water on Tuesday after the public water systems they depend on were considered “non-operational” by the exceptionally cold winter explosion, the Texas Environmental Quality Commission said.
And in some places where the water was recently restored, what came out of the tap left a lot to be desired.
“The water itself is coming out all yellow,” San Antonio’s mother, Evelyn Esquivel, told NBC News.
But at least Esquivel had water. Water service in rural areas is being restored at a much slower pace, officials said.
“It is safe to say that we have literally never seen anything like this,” Toby Baker, executive director of the environmental quality commission, told NBC News affiliate in the state capital Austin. “So our regional offices are systematically trying to reach out and be proactive in trying to reach out to these smaller rural water systems to say, ‘Hey, what do you need?'”
Still, the commission said considerable progress had been made since Saturday, when 1,445 public water systems reported service interruptions due to the cold, affecting 14.4 million Texans in 190 counties.
In addition, although power has been restored in much of Texas after the state’s power grid has doubled in the face of historically low temperatures, many people have also been hit by huge electricity bills because a power outage means higher prices in the state market system.
Governor Greg Abbott, Republican and champion of the free market, has already promised to protect consumers from “irrational accounts”.
“Texans who have suffered from freezing cold days without energy should not be subjected to skyrocketing energy bills due to a spike in the energy market,” Abbott said on Sunday.
State Representative Rafael Anchía, a Dallas Democrat, told NBC News on Tuesday that “this situation has not ended by a long shot.”
“We had millions of Texans suffering from a very deep recession caused by the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Anchía. “We already had people in a fragile state, and when you add that to the worst winter storm and disaster in the entire state. . people who barely held on are completely eliminated. “
But after plaguing Texas for a week, Mother Nature was now lending a hand. On Tuesday, it was 70 degrees and the sun was sunny in Houston, a far cry from the sub-zero temperatures that some parts of Texas experienced just a few days ago.
The forecast for Friday, when President Joe Biden was due to visit Houston, the largest city in Texas, to check recovery efforts, was a typical winter high of 64 degrees with cloudy conditions, according to The Weather Channel .
However, there was still a lot of work to be done to get Texas back to normal.
“Nearly half of residents in one of the largest states in the United States are experiencing plumbing catastrophe due to pipe ruptures due to freezing temperatures and significant power cuts,” said George Greene IV of Water Mission, a Christian engineering organization with South Carolina headquarters that normally works in developing countries on community drinking water and sanitation development projects and responds to disasters where emergency access to drinking water is needed.
“Not having water at home means you can’t flush, shower or wash clothes,” said Greene.
Water Mission is putting together a game plan to make repairs that will take weeks, if not months, to finish and asked a partner organization, Plumbers Without Borders, to call 1,600 licensed volunteers to help with the huge repair work, the spokesman said. voice of the Gregg Dinino group.
In San Antonio, traffic was heavy at the city’s main food bank, where members of the Texas National Guard and volunteers from a Mormon church helped distribute supplies and a line of cars stretched for about two miles outside the parking lot when a NBC News reporter came on Tuesday.
Louie Guzman, development director at the Food Bank, said that on most days they serve about 150 people. Since the storm, the numbers have jumped to around 400 a day.
“We are seeing a bigger turnout on days that we don’t anticipate,” said Guzman. “In the afternoon here, they usually anticipate 150 to 200, but we saw twice that because of the storm.”
One of those waiting in line was Esquivel, 38, who said that in addition to her husband and three children, she has her parents and two brothers staying at her home. And although medical experts warned against too many people in the house during a pandemic, Esquivel said he couldn’t stop them.
“Honestly, I didn’t think about Covid, it was my last thing,” she said. “I was just trying to survive and keep warm because it was cold. Was cold.”
Esquivel said that her energy has returned, but the water coming out of the tap is a sickly yellow and she is boiling. She said she came to the Food Bank because her husband is struggling to find a job in construction and because her local warehouse has been largely cleaned.
“There was no water, no milk, just pasta and stuff,” she said.
Having little experience with snowstorms, Esquivel said it did not occur to him to stock up on crampons ahead of time.
“We survived,” she said. “We can say that we are blessed and we survive.”
Michael Ybarra stocked up before the storm, but after the power ran out, there was only enough space in the insulated chest that he kept in the snow for the meat he had bought. Then the milk and eggs spoiled.
“This situation is very bad,” said Ybarra, 40. “We lost a lot of food and stuff.”
Gamboa reported from San Antonio and Siemaszko from Montclair, NJ