Live Winter Storm Updates: Latest from Texas and the US

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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 much of the southern and central United States.

“It is very bad that, as Texans, we cannot prepare for the cold – in all other parts of the country, that would not have been a problem.” “We lost energy yesterday morning at the house. It started to get really cold around two, and then you took off all the blankets. We try to sleep together to keep warm, go to the cars to keep our phones charged. And then today, when we got up, there was no water. ”“ Yesterday morning, there was a power outage around 7:55. I was sick most of the day. I’m leaving because we have two kids, to keep them warm, and we slept here last night, waiting for the power to arrive this morning. But we have no real update on when it will arrive and our phones barely work, then. ” [laughter]

Nearly three million Texans were still without power on Wednesday after a winter storm increased consumer demand for electricity while pummeling the state’s power grid.

Now the state is gearing up for another arctic explosion, with a winter storm warning in effect for dozens of counties in the Fort Worth-Dallas area by Thursday morning. The accumulation of ice and three to seven centimeters of snow is expected, with up to six centimeters of snow to the northeast of the metropolitan region.

There was little respite on Tuesday night from the previous storm, with freezing rain in much of central Texas and several inches of snow north of Dallas. The winter has left at least 29 people dead across the country since last week, along with extremely low temperatures.

In the Northeast and Midwest, residents are now recovering. The areas near Buffalo saw snowfalls of 2.5 to 5 centimeters an hour on Tuesday, and the National Weather Service has recorded more than a foot of snow in Chicago since Sunday night.

More than 160,000 people in Oregon remained without power as of Wednesday morning, and tens of thousands were left without electricity in Kentucky, West Virginia and Louisiana, according to poweroutage.us, a website that monitors electricity outages.

But the worst disruptions occurred in Texas, which is entering its third day of widespread crisis. Governor Greg Abbott declared an emergency reform of the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which runs the state’s electrical grid and is struggling to restore power.

The board ordered Austin Energy to shut off some of the power on Tuesday night, according to the utility’s Twitter account, saying it can affect people who previously restored it. Mayor Steve Adler urged residents to use electricity as cheaply as possible, hoping to avoid further downtime, using flashlights and candles if possible.

“If you have power, try to live almost as if you don’t,” said Adler. “If you have heating, reduce it. Lower it. “

Here is some good news for storm-hit communities in the United States: The brutal weather that killed at least 29 people, interrupted the distribution of vaccines and left millions without power was moving to northern Canada late on Tuesday.

Now, for more bad news: icy air may persist in the Great Plains and the Mississippi Valley midweek, and a new winter storm is expected to sweep south and east over the next two days. More than 100 million Americans are under some kind of warning related to the winter weather, said the National Weather Service.

“I’m not looking forward to tonight’s model of the storm forecast to hit Virginia on Thursday,” Jim Duncan, a meteorologist for an NBC affiliate in Richmond, Va., said on Twitter Tuesday night. “Being a meteorologist at this time does not bring joy, but anguish.”

The South is already suffering from a rare cold wave. THE temperature in Houston, Texason Monday night – 13 degrees – it was lower than in Houston, Alaska. And the Oklahoma capital on Tuesday experienced its coldest morning since 1899.

This will continue for at least a few more days. High temperatures this week are likely to be 25 to 40 degrees below average in a strip of the central and southern United States, the Meteorological Service said.

There will also be more precipitation. As of Tuesday morning, nearly three-quarters of the continental United States was covered in snow, the longest stretch on record since the National Water Center created a database for this in 2003. And the forecast indicates that there will be even more snow this week, from the southern plains to the Mississippi valley.

Meteorologists also expect “significant freezing rain”And half-inch ice accumulations from the Gulf Coast to Tennessee. A long list of warnings, warnings and winter weather alerts was in effect on Tuesday night.

After striking the south, the new storm will hit the Ohio Valley, the Mid-Atlantic region and the Northeast on Wednesday or Thursday, the National Weather Service said. Appalachian parts can receive up to 15 centimeters of snow. Virginia and North Carolina may also experience new waves of ice and freezing rain.

It won’t be too cold everywhere, but even in places where snow is falling – in the Deep South and beyond – they can experience scattered rain showers and isolated storms.

Large parts of the central and southern United States plunged into an energy crisis this week, with power grids damaged by blasts from the Arctic. Millions of Americans are without power amid dangerously low temperatures.

The network outages were most severe in Texas, where nearly three million customers woke up on Wednesday morning to power failures. On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott called for an emergency reform of the Texas Electric Reliability Council, saying the state’s grid operator “has been anything but reliable for the past 48 hours.”

Analysts have begun to identify some key factors behind the Texas network failures. Record cold weather spurred residents to increase their electric heaters and pushed demand for electricity beyond the worst scenario that network operators had planned.

At the same time, many of the state’s gas-fired power plants were shut down amid icy conditions, and some plants appeared to suffer from fuel shortages due to increased demand for natural gas across the country. Many Texas wind turbines also froze and stopped working, although that was a minor part of the problem.

The resulting electricity deficits forced Texas grid operators to impose rotating blackouts on homes and businesses, starting on Monday, to prevent a wider system collapse. Separate regional networks in the southwest and midwest are also under heavy pressure this week.

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.

As the bone-chilling arctic climate hits the southern and central parts of the United States, power grids are overloaded and millions of people unaccustomed to the sight of snow are trying to figure out how to stay warm.

Some turned to risky heat sources, including gas generators, ovens and even automobiles. At least two people died and about 100 fell ill from carbon monoxide poisoning over 16 hours on Monday and Tuesday in the Houston area, officials said.

Early symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning include headache, weakness, dizziness and nausea, according to the Firelands Regional Medical Center in Sandusky, Ohio. People who are “sleeping or drunk” may die from the disease before experiencing symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Carbon monoxide, a by-product of burning fossil fuels, is colorless and odorless, making it more difficult to detect than other dangerous substances. But carbon monoxide poisoning is “totally preventable”, says the CDC.

The agency urged people to have carbon monoxide detectors in place and warned against heating homes with a gas oven or burning anything on a stove or fireplace that has no ventilation.

The internal use of charcoal, gasoline engines or even portable gas stoves is also dangerous, say health and safety officials. They also warn against the operation of generators or cars inside to heat houses.

In Houston, the police said this week that a woman and a girl were killed for carbon monoxide poisoning after a car was left running in an attached garage “to create heat when power is off”. A man and a boy were also hospitalized.

In Oregon, four people were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning over the weekend, the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office said on tuesday.