DALLAS (AP) – Higher temperatures spread across the southern United States on Saturday, bringing relief to a winter-tired region that faces challenging cleaning and expensive repairs from extreme cold days and widespread outages.
In the hard-hit Texas, where millions were told to boil tap water before drinking it, the warming was supposed to last for several days. The thaw produced pipe ruptures across the region, adding to the list of disasters from severe conditions that were responsible for more than 70 deaths.
By Saturday afternoon, the sun had risen in Dallas and temperatures were approaching 50 degrees. People started walking and running in residential neighborhoods after days indoors. Many roads had dried up and patches of snow were melting. The snowmen fell.
Linda Nguyen woke up in a hotel room in Dallas on Saturday morning with a guarantee she hadn’t received in almost a week: she and the cat had a place to sleep with energy and water.
Electricity was restored to his apartment on Wednesday. But when Nguyen arrived from work the next night, she found a soggy rug. A pipe burst in his room.
“It is essentially impossible to live,” said Nguyen, 27, who works in real estate. “Everything is completely ruined.”
The deaths attributed to the climate include a man at an Abilene health center, where the lack of water pressure made medical treatment impossible. Authorities also reported deaths from hypothermia, including homeless people and people inside buildings without power or heating. Others died in car accidents on icy roads or from suspected carbon monoxide poisoning.
Nearly half of the deaths reported so far have occurred in Texas, with several fatalities also in Tennessee, Kentucky, Oregon and some other southern and midwestern states.
A farmer in Tennessee died trying to save two calves from a frozen lake.
President Joe Biden’s office said on Saturday that he declared a major disaster in Texas, directing federal agencies to aid recovery.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, tweeted on Saturday that she helped raise more than $ 3 million in aid. She was asking for help from a Houston food bank, one of 12 Texas organizations she said would benefit from the donations.
The storms left more than 300,000 people still without power across the country on Saturday, many in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
More than 50,000 electricity consumers in Oregon were among those without power, more than a week after an ice storm destroyed the power grid. Portland General Electric expected to have the service back to everyone except 15,000 customers by Friday night. But the utility found additional damage in previously inaccessible areas.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown ordered the National Guard to go door to door in some areas to check on the residents’ well-being. At its peak, what was the worst ice storm in 40 years cut the power of more than 350,000 customers.
In West Virginia, Appalachian Power was working on a list of about 1,500 locations in need of repair, as some 44,000 customers in the state remained without electricity after facing consecutive ice storms on February 11 and February 15. More than 3,200 workers were trying to get the energy back online, their efforts spread across the six most affected counties on Saturday.
In Wayne County, West Virginia, workers had to replace the same pole three times because trees continued to fall on it.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott met with lawmakers from both parties on Saturday to discuss energy prices, while Texans face massive spikes in their electricity bills after wholesale energy prices soared while power plants were disconnected.
“We have a responsibility to protect Texans from spikes in their energy bills” resulting from the climate, he said in a statement.
Water problems have increased misery for people across the South who have been without heating or electricity for days after the ice. Snowstorms forced continuous blackouts from Minnesota to Texas.
Robert Tuskey was retrieving tools from the back of his truck on Saturday afternoon, as he prepared to repair a water pipe at a friend’s home in Dallas.
“Everything is freezing,” said Tuskey. “I even had one in my own home … of course I’m lucky to be a plumber.”
Tuskey, 49, said his plumbing business had received a flow of requests for help from friends and relatives with broken pipes. “I am preparing to help another family member,” he said. “I know she has no money, but they have no water and are older.”
In Jackson, Mississippi, most of the city of 161,000 had no piped water, and authorities held municipal pipelines over 100 years old and not built for the cold climate.
The city was providing water for flushing and drinking water. But residents had to take it, leaving the elderly and those who lived on icy roads vulnerable.
Passenger inbound and outbound flights at Memphis International Airport resumed on Saturday after all flights were canceled on Friday due to water pressure problems. The problems were not resolved, but airport officials installed temporary restrooms.
Prison rights advocates said some correctional facilities across Louisiana had intermittent electricity and frozen pipes, affecting bathrooms and showers.
Men who are sick, elderly or kept not in dormitories, but in cell blocks – small spaces surrounded by concrete walls – were especially vulnerable, according to Voice of the Experienced, a grassroots organization founded and run by people previously incarcerated. The group said a man from the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, south of Baton Rouge, described a thin layer of ice on its walls.
Cammie Maturin said she spoke to men at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola with 6,300 inmates, who did not receive extra provisions to protect themselves from the cold.
“They don’t give them extra blankets. Without anything extra. For them, it’s just you, ”said Maturin, president of the non-profit HOPE Foundation.
In many areas, water pressure dropped after the lines froze and because people left the taps dripping to prevent the pipes from freezing, officials said.
On Saturday, 1,445 public water systems in Texas had reported disrupted operations, said Toby Baker, executive director of the state’s Environmental Quality Commission. Government agencies were using mobile laboratories and coordinating to speed up water testing.
This represents 1,300 reporting problems on Friday afternoon. But Baker said the number of affected customers has dropped slightly. Most were under orders for boiling water, with 156,000 without water service altogether.
“It looks like it was last night that we saw some stabilization in water systems across the state,” said Baker.
Saturday’s meltdown, after 11 days of freezing temperatures in Oklahoma City, left residents with broken water pipes, inoperable wells and furnaces paralyzed by brief blackouts.
Rhodes College in Memphis said on Friday that about 700 residential students were being transferred to hotels on the outskirts of Germantown and Collierville after school bathrooms stopped functioning due to low water pressure.
Firefighters extinguished a fire at a 102-room hotel in Killeen, Texas, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) north of Austin, on Friday. The hotel’s sprinkler system did not work because of the frozen pipes, officials said on Saturday.
The flames came out of the top of the four-story hotel and three people needed medical attention. Displaced guests were taken to a nearby Baptist church.
Texas grid operators said electricity transmission returned to normal after the historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures created an increase in demand that affected the state’s system.
Minor outages remained, but Bill Magness, chairman of the Texas Electric Reliability Council, said the grid could now supply power to the entire system.
Abbott has ordered an investigation into the failure of a state known as the energy capital of the United States. ERCOT officials defended their preparations and the decision to initiate forced interruptions on Monday, when the network reached the breaking point.
The blackouts have resulted in at least two lawsuits filed against ERCOT and utility companies, including one filed by the family of an 11-year-old boy who is believed to have died of hypothermia. The lawsuits claim that ERCOT ignored repeated warnings of weaknesses in the state’s energy infrastructure.
In addition, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued civil investigation demands to ERCOT and electricity companies. Your investigation will address power outages, emergency plans, energy prices and more related to the winter storm.
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Scolforo reported in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
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Associated Press journalists Gillian Flaccus in Portland, Oregon; Ellen Knickmeyer in Oklahoma City; Jim Mustian in New York; Terry Wallace in Dallas; Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix; and Kimberlee Kruesi in Boise, Idaho contributed.