HOUSTON – In the middle of the week that Texas froze, everything seemed to be in a state of icy chaos.
Some houses had no water, while others watched it gush from broken pipes into corridors and living rooms. In Galveston, where dozens huddled on Monday and Tuesday in a county-run heating center, the newest urgent need was refrigerated trucks – to store the bodies that were to be found in the coming days. And on Wednesday, more than 2.5 million people were still without power, while at least twice as many were being instructed to boil water.
The winter attack was far from over. In central Texas, where many roads have been impassable for days, another flood of hail and snow was expected for Wednesday night. The new storm was expected to march towards the Mid-Atlantic, reaching parts of North Carolina and Virginia that are already under the ice of the last storm.
In Houston, Catherine Saenz and her family, like most of their neighbors, have had neither light nor water for days, as the city remains in the grip of the most violent winter in memory. But they are lucky: they have a fireplace.
Even the fireplaces need to be fed, however, and to keep both parents, two daughters and two grandmothers from freezing, her husband spent hours in the afternoon scouring the neighborhood for fallen trees and rotten wood.
“I never imagined that we would be in that situation,” said Saenz, who grew up in Colombia but lived in Houston during hurricanes Ike and Harvey. “Nobody is prepared, it is dangerous and we are very vulnerable.”
As the storm moved eastward, Duke Energy alerted its customers in the Carolinas that there could be a million power cuts in the next few days. Maryland Governor Larry Hogan gave a similar warning, telling residents to keep their phones charged and prepare for the approaching snow and ice.
At least 31 people have died across the country since the cold winter began last week. Some died in accidents on icy roads, some succumbed to the cold and others died when desperate attempts to find a little heat became deadly.
Across the country, homes were still without power – more than 150,000 outages in Oregon, 111,000 in Louisiana and 88,000 in Kentucky on Wednesday afternoon – but nowhere was it as bad as in Texas. The Texas Electric Reliability Council, which manages the state’s power grid, said on Wednesday that some 700,000 homes had electricity restored overnight, but that more than 2.6 million customers were still without power. The Houston mayor’s office posted on Twitter on Wednesday that power cuts “would likely last a few more days.”
During a news conference on Wednesday, Governor Greg Abbott said there was still a power outage. “All the sources of energy that the state of Texas has been compromised on,” said Abbott, from coal and renewable energy to nuclear energy.
He signed an executive order on Wednesday directing natural gas suppliers to suspend all gas shipments outside the state, ordering them to direct those sales to Texas power generators.
W. Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Emergency Management Division, said that several state agencies have worked together to meet the demands of nursing homes, hospitals and dialysis centers, which have reported a variety of problems, including interruptions in the supply of water and lack of oxygen. As another storm approaches, the state increases the number of heating centers to more than 300.
Water has also emerged as a major problem, with nearly seven million Texans under the guidance of boiling water and about 263,000 people affected by water providers that are not working.
The crisis highlighted a deeper alert for energy systems across the country. Electrical networks can be designed to handle a wide range of harsh conditions – as long as network operators can safely predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electrical networks will face new and extreme weather events that go beyond the historical conditions for which these networks were designed, putting systems at risk of catastrophic failure.
In a sign of how fundamental needs are in Texas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency sent blankets, bottled water and meals, in addition to 60 generators, to help the state power “critical infrastructure” like hospitals. FEMA will also supply diesel oil to the state “to ensure the continued availability of reserve power,” said Jen Psaki, press secretary of the White House, at a news conference on Wednesday.
“Our team and FEMA continue to monitor the situation in Texas, as well as in other states on the path of the storm that may be affected,” said Psaki. “We remain in close contact with states across the affected area to ensure that all federal support requirements are met.”
Despite a hard-won experience with natural disasters like hurricanes, this was an entirely new type of misery in Texas, all the more distressing because it is so unknown. Calls were coming in to 911 and other law enforcement lines at three times the normal rate, said Jason Spencer, a spokesman for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, from people who desperately sought advice on burst pipes, asking which ones. it would be the symptoms of hypothermia or just looking for some release from the intense cold.
Emergency workers, many of them leaving their own families behind in frozen and powerless homes, had to respond to calls for help navigating on dangerously icy roads. Some of the most dire situations will only be known in the days to come.
“We hope that when things start to thaw and people start checking each other out, we will find some people who didn’t survive the storm,” said Spencer. “We responded to death calls, we had suicides, we had at least one homeless person who we believe died of hypothermia.”
But, he said, it is probably “just the tip of the iceberg”.
That disasters do not fall uniformly on rich and poor is a lesson that Texans have learned from the past, and it seemed to be no less true this week.
“I understand that we live in a less well-kept neighborhood, but we are human like everyone else,” said Justin Chavez, who lived with his wife and eight children in an impotent home in San Antonio for days.
Since Sunday night, his family had been gathering at night under tea candlelight, cooking Hot Pockets on a gas stove and blocking icy drafts with towels tucked under the front and back doors. The children were exhausted. Chávez, 33, was in the yard on Wednesday morning watching his three dogs and a big-bellied pig rummaging in the snow. The four fish that the family kept died freezing.
“The city should be on top of that,” said Chávez. “What am I paying my taxes for?”
People desperate for light and heat have searched in vain for hotels, although many of the hotels are in the same situation – helpless, with a lack of food – as the houses around them. And where there is power, rooms are almost impossible to find.
“I’ve been to Katrina, I’ve been to Harvey and this is by far the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Brent Shives, assistant general manager of the Hilton Garden Inn in Austin, where the front desk works has faced a steady stream of desperate people looking shelter. “I had to send a mother away with her 7-month-old son. They had no energy or water at home. I had to go back to my office and cry. “
In the absence of hotel rooms, you will find the rooms of friends, neighbors and family.
Since the beginning of the week, three sets of families have moved in with Andrea Chacin and her husband in their small two-story home in the Heights area of Houston. They came because her house still had power. In these circumstances, fears about Covid-19 simply had to be put aside.
But then the water at Mrs. Chacin’s house stopped flowing.
Thus, the eight adults and a baby in their home are trying to manage, alternating trips to the bathroom, flushing with water collected from outside or from the shrinking reservoir in the bathtub. It was getting very tiring, she said.
“It’s not just you,” she said. “You are still taking on the situation of everyone around you.” Ms. Chacin talked about her grandparents, who are in their 90s and lost power at their home in the Houston suburbs. They were trapped by the icy roads, so they slept on a couch in front of the fireplace.
“I think we have a right to be angry,” she said. “Why do you have to wait until things happen and go wrong.”
Maria Jimenez Moya reported from Houston, Campbell Robertson Pittsburgh, and Allyson Waller of Conroe, Texas. The report was contributed by Marina Trahan Martinez from Austin, Texas, James Dobbins from San Antonio, Marie Fazio from Jacksonville, Florida, Will Wright and John Schwartz of New York, and Brad Plumer of Washington.