DALLAS – Power began to flicker in much of Texas on Thursday, but millions across the state faced another terrible crisis: a shortage of drinking water due to broken pipes, frozen wells and disconnected water treatment plants.
The problems were especially serious in hospitals. One of them in Austin was forced to transfer some of his most serious patients to another building when his taps almost ran dry. Another in Houston had to transport water in trucks to flush.
But for many of the state’s residents trapped at home, the emergency meant boiling tap water running through the taps, scouring stores for bottled water or boiling ice and dirty snow on their stoves.
For others, it meant no water. Denise Gonzalez, 40, joined a crowd at a makeshift relief center in a working-class corner of West Dallas on Thursday, where volunteers distributed food from the luggage compartment of a chartered bus.
Back at the apartment, she said, the lights finally came on. But its tubes were completely frozen. She couldn’t shower, bathe or use the bathroom. She said she called plumbers all day, but one of the few who answered said it would cost $ 3,000 to assess the damage.
“If I had $ 3,000,” said Gonzalez, “I wouldn’t be getting food from people on the bus.”
Major disruptions to the Texas power grid left more than four million households without power this week, but as of Thursday night, only about 347,000 had no electricity. Much of the concern across the state has turned to water problems.
More than 800 public water systems serving 162 of the state’s 254 counties were shut down by Thursday, affecting 13.1 million people, according to a spokeswoman for the Texas Environmental Quality Commission.
In Harris County, which includes Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city, more than a million people have been affected by local water systems that have issued warnings to boil water so that it is safe to drink or that they cannot provide water none, said Brian Murray, a spokesman for the county’s emergency management agency.
Residents of the Texas capital, Austin, were also instructed to boil water due to a power failure at the city’s largest water treatment plant. Austin Water director Greg Meszaros said the drop in temperatures caused the pipelines to rupture and the pipes to burst, increasing water use and allowing water to leak from the system.
He said on Thursday that power had been restored and that restoring water to hospitals and other health facilities was a priority. The city’s reservoirs, which can hold about 100 million gallons of water – or the equivalent of one day of water for Austin – have been nearly emptied because of leaks or increased use by residents.
“We never imagined a day when hospitals would not have water,” he said.
For many Texans, the interruptions were an impressive nuisance that seemed to push them back past the state’s border. People searched for firewood in suburban yards, shuddered in dark houses, lived on canned food, and ran out of electronics.
Others faced more dire consequences. At South Austin Medical Center in St. David, authorities were trying on Wednesday night to repair a heating system that was failing because of low water pressure. They were forced to find portable toilets and distribute water bottles to patients and staff so they could wash their hands.
In San Antonio, Jesse Singh, 58, who owns a Shell gas station, said his 80-year-old father was prevented from having regularly scheduled dialysis treatments on Tuesday and Thursday because his clinic was having problems with access to water. .
“It is a dangerous situation,” said Singh.
Compounding the problem was the fact that much of Texas was still experiencing cold weather and snowstorms on Thursday, part of a winter spell that wreaked havoc that also shed snow and generated winter storm alerts in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut through Friday night.
Corey Brown, an employee at Tyler Water Utilities – which serves the city of Tyler in northeastern Texas – said the temperature was 20 degrees on Thursday, which complicated efforts to restore the water service. Mr. Brown estimated that half of the dealership’s 110,000 customers were completely without water.
“They had cold water pipes,” he said. “We have two water treatment plants – one of them broke and we also had power cuts. And then we had a severe freeze in the last few days, so as a result, a lot of pipes are freezing and this is disrupting the flow to some people’s homes or causing low pressure. “
Glacier days left at least 38 people dead across the country, made many roads impassable, interrupted vaccine distribution and covered almost three-quarters of the continental United States with snow. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said they had made 60 generators available “to support critical infrastructure” in Texas and were providing blankets, bottled water and meals to the state.
The head of the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which operates the state’s power grid, warned on Thursday that the state “is not yet out of danger”, largely due to the persistent cold.
“We are still in very cold conditions, so we are still seeing a much higher than normal demand in the winter,” Bill Magness, chairman and executive director of the board, told a news conference. This means, he said, that planned outages may be necessary in the coming days to keep the network stable.
“If we have a bump and some generation has to come back, we may have to ask for interruptions,” he said. “But if we do, we believe that they will be at the level where they could be rotational interruptions, not the larger numbers we faced earlier this week.”
There were other signs of progress. William P. Hobby Airport in Houston, which was forced to close on Wednesday because of water supply problems, announced on Thursday morning, that it had restored water to a limited capacity and that flights would resume.
But even with the energy flashing back to many Texans, thousands more remained without light or water. For Angelina Diaz and her four children, Thursday was yet another shuttle day between the cold house in West Dallas and the cramped SUV parked in the garage.
It was day 4 without a shower or bath. Day 4 without bathroom. Day 4 warming up bottled water on a barbecue to prepare the formula for Ms. Diaz’s 6-month-old daughter, Jimena.
The family spent nearly a year zealously washing their hands to avoid contracting the coronavirus, and they feared that a week without water would nullify those efforts.
“How can we keep our hands clean?” Mrs. Diaz, 25, asked.
Most of the neighbors had electricity on Thursday afternoon, but as utility trucks drove through the mud, Diaz was losing patience for sleeping in the car and shaking under the blankets. She was attracted to hotels or heating centers run by the city, but was very concerned about exposing her family to the virus. Then he went back to the SUV to wait.
At Family Place, a domestic violence shelter in Dallas, the power had been cut off for two days when the flooded roof collapsed, releasing a freezing waterfall over the 120 women and children seeking refuge there.
The water soaked their clothes and the few belongings they had brought, ruining legal documents that were difficult to replace. The corridors became streams. Residents and officials tried to sweep up water and stack sheets to build dams, but soon gave up and hurriedly huddled on five city buses to seek shelter in a church.
“They basically lost everything,” said Shelbi Driver, a resident defender for the shelter.
Supporters said at least three other domestic violence shelters around Dallas were also evacuated after pipes burst and flooded their corridors with icy water, displacing hundreds of vulnerable people who had no option of returning home.
“They went through horrible trauma, came to our organization to be safe and had another trauma,” said Paige Flink, chief executive of Family Place. “Just saying that makes me want to cry,” she said. “It’s a total nightmare.”
Jack Healy reported from Dallas, Richard Fausset Atlanta, and James Dobbins from San Antonio. Maria Jimenez Moya contributed reporting from Houston, and Lucy Tompkins of New York.