As large parts of Texas wake up to yet another day of energy crisis in the midst of a still cold winter, problems with water systems have increased misery for much of the state’s population.
Dozens of Texans were warned to boil tap water before drinking it, after days of record low temperatures that damaged infrastructure, caused blackouts and froze plumbing.
Millions across the U.S. were left without electricity or heating after the deadly winter storm, while utility teams scrambled to restore power before another blast of snow and ice this week.
Another major winter storm is expected to spread from the Lower Mississippi valley to the middle of the Atlantic and northeast by Friday, the National Meteorological Service said, bringing more heavy snow, hail and freezing rain to further complicate recovery efforts.
Travel remains paralyzed in much of the United States, with treacherous roads and thousands of canceled flights. Many school systems have also delayed or canceled face-to-face classes.
But staying at home also brought risks in places without power.
The winter weather caused blackouts in Texas that affected 1.8 million customers on Wednesday night, according to the tracking website poweroutage.us. That number dropped to 630,000 at 7 am Eastern time, the website said.
Without power or heating, some Texans posted videos on their social media burning old furniture to keep warm. Others shared images of floods caused by burst pipes and collapsed roofs.
The extreme winter weather earlier this week and the ensuing problems – power outages and broken lines due to freezing – forced 276 water systems to issue boiling water warnings, according to Toby Baker, executive director of the Quality Commission Texas Environmental.
Almost 264,000 Texans live in areas where water systems are completely inoperable.
Meanwhile, in Austin, the city’s electricity service has warned that customers must be prepared not to have power until Wednesday and possibly more.
A city-wide water boil warning was issued on Wednesday night due to a loss of power at Austin’s largest water treatment facility and a drop in water pressure.
One of the local hospitals had to transfer some of its most needy patients to other facilities and discharge others after losing water pressure, which impacted its heating system.
In Houston, more than 1 million people remained without power on Wednesday, said Mayor Sylvester Turner, adding that the power would not be fully restored for a few more days. The city has been on the alert for boiling water since Wednesday morning.
The city’s public works department has received more than 1,500 calls about water leaks and water outages since Monday, officials said.
Harris County judge Lina Hidalgo said on MSNBC that the majority of her community, which includes Houston, is under boiling water, “but they don’t have the energy to boil water.”
Galveston has broken water lines across the island because of the low temperatures and is under warning of boiling water. The city of 50,000 said that with the power off for so long, there was an “unprecedented” number of broken pipes in homes.
“Now that energy is returning slowly and temperatures are rising, we are facing a great deal of water damage to homes and businesses,” the city said in a statement.
Freezing temperatures overnight are expected to continue for days in parts of Texas. Southeast Texas is not expected to rise in the 1950s until Saturday during the day, the Houston meteorological service said.
Even after the power is restored and the ice starts to melt, each water system will need bacteriological sampling to clear boiling water warnings, said the environmental quality committee’s Baker.
Sampling can take up to 24 hours, he said, and the state will work to get help from neighboring states.
In places with water, low temperatures with a lack of energy cause pipes to burst in homes.
“We literally recovered our energy half an hour ago, after 61 long hours of freezing in this house,” said Stacey Silverman of Dallas on Wednesday in an interview with Zerlina Maxwell of Peacock.
Silverman’s mother, 79, is staying at home because her pipes burst with cold and flooded her home.
She blamed the state for what she said was years of neglect and little investment. “This is not a natural disaster, what happened,” she said. “… Our state government has completely failed us.”
Water scarcity is affecting other states as well.
In Shreveport, Louisiana, city fire trucks delivered water to several hospitals, and bottled water was being brought in for patients and staff, reported the KSLA television station in Shreveport.
Nearly 115 million people, from the southern plains to New England, were still under winter warnings on Wednesday night.
Storms affected at least 35 deaths in eight states, including deaths in traffic accidents. Three people were killed in a tornado in North Carolina on Monday, and a woman and child died in Houston on Tuesday due to carbon monoxide poisoning after a car was used for heating in a powerless home, the authorities said.
Three deaths in Louisiana were attributed to the winter storm, including a 50-year-old man who slipped and fell on black ice, the health department said.
The Associated Press contributed.