More than 4 million Texans went to bed without heating on Monday night, as low temperatures brought a demand for energy that the state’s power grid was unable to meet and how another big storm targeted much of the middle of the country on Tuesday.
The storm that threw snow and ice from Arkansas to Indiana – and brought record low temperatures from Oklahoma City to Iron Range in Minnesota, where thermometers have dropped to minus 38 – it is expected to move northeast on Tuesday, the National Weather Service said.
Snow, freezing rain and ice are expected from the Ohio Valley to Pennsylvania and Maine, the forecast said.
In Texas, 4.3 million homes and businesses were out of power on Monday night, with the hardest hit area around Galveston and Houston, according to poweroutage.us.
Meteorologists warned that the region could see its coldest night in 30 years, when authorities begged residents to stay off the road, conserve energy and seal windows and windy doors.
“I’m not going to pretend it won’t be a difficult night,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo told reporters on Monday. “We will be watching, responding to crises that arise and we will overcome this together.”
Among the crises the county had already faced was a power outage – and subsequent failure of a backup generator – in its public health department, where more than 8,000 doses of coronavirus vaccine were being kept in cold storage, said Hidalgo .
Thousands of doses were promptly sent to Harris County Jail, Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital, Rice University and elsewhere, she said.
School images showed dozens of students trembling waiting for their photos.
“I literally dropped everything, put everything in and ran here, and apparently everyone had the same thoughts as me,” said a student to NBC affiliate KPRC.
Police said two men were found dead along roads in the Houston area. The causes of the deaths were pending, but officials said sub-zero temperatures were responsible.
Elsewhere in Texas, San Antonio International Airport canceled all flights scheduled for Tuesday, and the Dallas Stars delayed a National Hockey League game against the Nashville Predators in an effort to save energy.
The Houston Chronicle, for its part, was forced to stop producing its print edition after its plant lost power at 2 am. In a note to subscribers, the newspaper said it had not even happened when the city was hit by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Power outages forced Abilene, a city of about 170,000, to shut down the water service.
In an attempt to save energy, employees in Dallas said his skylines would get dark, and Kansas City did the same.
Kansas City, Missouri, as well as cities across the United States, including Tennessee and Iowa, were threatened by power cuts on Monday. Southwest Power Pool, a group of utilities in 17 states, called for continuous interruptions because the backup power supply had run out.
The Pacific Northwest was hit by a weekend storm and was dealing with persistent problems on Monday, with hundreds of thousands of people in Oregon still in the dark after snow and ice knocked down tree branches this weekend. and blocked storm drains in Washington and Idaho, raising concerns about flooding.
Nearly 5,000 power lines were knocked down by ice and tree branches, and several transmission lines were severely damaged by the storm that passed.
The National Weather Service said the next storm was expected to move from the Rocky Mountains to the Southern Plains on Tuesday, bringing freezing rain to eastern Texas and Louisiana and up to 20 inches of snow to parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas and southern Missouri. .
The Associated Press contributed.