ERCOT said those who are still without power are likely to be in areas where the ice has damaged the distribution system, live in areas where service needs to be restored manually, or are a large industrial facility that has shut down voluntarily to help with grid overload.
“The message, however, is: number one, energy is fragile because of the impacts, and number two, we now have water problems,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo told CNN. “Hospitals have problems. We have problems with water pressure. We are all getting boiling water warnings and people are having trouble accessing food.”
“I just started taking my screens off the wall, breaking them and throwing them into the fire,” she said.
Another round of adverse weather is expected. A winter weather warning is in effect from downtown East Texas, including Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio and Amarillo, according to CNN meteorologist Michael Guy. Snow is expected to fall in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with ice and freezing rain further south, to Laredo and Corpus Christi.
Temperatures will rise on Friday, but overnight conditions over the weekend will remain below freezing. Ice on bridges and overpasses will remain a threat until the end of Sunday on Monday.
Side effects of lack of energy for days
Smita Pande of Crestview told CNN that she and others may have to use melted snow to drink water when their water bottle runs out.
“We didn’t anticipate that the water would be cut, but as soon as it did, we assumed the ‘worst case’ kind of thing and just took the snow off the porch and put it in kettles and pots to use as drinking water, in case we don’t get the water back so soon, “said Pande. “If the power outage is any indication of how long it will last, then we will boil snow for a while.”
Disruptions have also led to food shortages as Texans look for the necessary supplies and look for a hot meal.
“Grocery stores are no longer able to ship dairy products. Store shelves are already empty,” said Texas agriculture commissioner Sid Miller. “We are looking at a food supply chain problem like we’ve never seen before, even with Covid-19.”
Philip Shelley, a Fort Worth resident, told CNN that he, his wife Amber and 11-month-old daughter Ava are struggling to stay warm and fed. Amber is pregnant and scheduled for April 4.
“(Ava) was reduced to half a can of formula,” said Philip. “The stores are sold out, if not extremely low on food. Most of the food in the refrigerator is spoiled. The frozen food is almost defrosted, but we have no way to heat it.”
Why the power grid almost collapsed
A winter weather system has brought exceptionally cold temperatures to much of the central United States in recent days. The deep freeze caused demand for energy and heating to skyrocket while eliminating Texas’ natural gas, coal, wind and nuclear facilities, which were not ready to operate in such a cold climate.
The storm caused severe disruptions across the country, including Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky. But the outages were more severe in Texas because the state operates on its own power grid, ERCOT – a way to avoid federal regulation – and cannot easily borrow energy from other states.
ERCOT officials said on Thursday that the power grid was “seconds or minutes” from a catastrophic failure and a complete blackout, were it not for the controlled outages implemented on Monday morning.
“I think that if we hadn’t acted, it wouldn’t have been that we would have waited a few days and seen what happened, it was seconds and minutes, given the amount of generation that was leaving the system at the same time that the demand was still increasing significantly” , said Bill Magness, ERCOT president and CEO.
As with any systemic failure, guilt is spreading everywhere. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission members said they would partner with North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit organization, to investigate the flaws.
Governor Abbott said on Wednesday afternoon that an ERCOT investigation is scheduled to begin next week.
“We learned in a really tragic way that ERCOT and the state were not prepared to have enough reserve energy to have a resilient energy supply to face the historic climate that we all really knew was coming,” said Judge Hidalgo.
CNN’s Dave Alsup, Chris Boyette, Alisha Ebrahimji, Carma Hassan, Madeline Holcombe, Amanda Jackson, Paul P. Murphy, Andy Rose, Raja Razek, Barbara Starr, Joe Sutton, Suzanne Presto, Greg Wallace and Christina Zdanowicz contributed to this report.