One family has resorted to burning their toddler’s toy blocks as firewood. Others are tearing down fences to burn. This is how Texans are surviving utilities failure.
But the winter storm and ongoing cold were still affecting the system’s power generation, and rotating outages may be needed over the next couple of days, the company said.
ERCOT said those still without power are likely in areas where ice has damaged the distribution system, live in areas where service needs to be restored manually, or are a large industrial facility that voluntarily went offline to help with grid overload.
“People are angry and confused and frustrated, and I am, too,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler said.
Angel Garcia, a nurse from Killeen, Texas, told CNN that she and her family are monitoring their 5-month old son, who was born prematurely and is running out of oxygen supply. The family has no heat in their home. They resorted to burning their toddler’s toy blocks as firewood.
“A lot of people don’t know the severity of what’s going on. People are tearing down their fences to burn,” Garcia said in tears.
Another round of harsh weather is forecast. A winter weather warning is in effect from Central to 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 as far as Laredo and Corpus Christi.
Temperatures will rise Friday, yet overnight conditions throughout the weekend will remain below freezing. Icing on bridges and overpasses will remain a threat until late Sunday into Monday.
Since last Thursday, 16 Texans have died due to the extreme weather, according to a CNN tally.
Spillover effects of no power for days
Smita Pande, of Crestview, told CNN she and others may have to use melted snow for drinking water when their bottled water runs out.
“We didn’t anticipate the water to be shut off, but once it did, we assumed a ‘worst case scenario’ type of thing and just grabbed snow off the balcony and put into kettles and pots to use for drinking water in case we don’t get water back anytime soon,” Pande said. “If the power outage is any indication of how long that’ll be, then we are going to be boiling snow for a while.”
The outages have also led to food shortages as residents scramble for needed supplies and grocery stores with no power can’t refrigerate goods.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller asked Gov. Greg Abbott to designate agriculture producers and processors as critical infrastructure.
“I’m getting calls from farmers and ranchers across the state reporting that the interruptions in electricity and natural gas are having a devastating effect on their operations,” Miller said in a statement.
“Grocery stores are already unable to get shipments of dairy products. Store shelves are already empty. We’re looking at a food supply chain problem like we’ve never seen before, even with Covid-19,” Miller continued.
Philip Shelley, a resident of Fort Worth, told CNN that he, his wife Amber and 11-month-old daughter Ava are struggling to stay warm and fed. Amber is pregnant and due April 4.
“(Ava) is down to half a can of formula,” Philip said. “Stores are out if not extremely low on food. Most of our food in the refrigerator is spoiled. Freezer food is close to thawed but we have no way to heat it up.”
Electric grid was close to collapse
Customers wait in line to enter Frontier Fiesta on February 17, 2021 in Houston, Texas.
A winter weather system brought unusually frigid temperatures to much of the central US over the past few days. The deep freeze caused demand for power and heating to skyrocket even as it knocked out Texas’s natural gas, coal, wind and nuclear facilities, which were not ready to function in such cold weather.
The storm has caused serious outages across the country, including in Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky. But the outages were most severe in Texas because the state runs on its own electric grid, ERCOT — a way to avoid federal regulation — and cannot easily borrow power from other states.
US Rep. Marc Veasey, a Democrat who represents parts of Fort Worth and Dallas, said he’s learned from an industry executive that the power grid was just minutes from failing on Monday before state agency officials initiated emergency rolling outages.
“I want people to know that we were minutes away from the entire grid crashing,” he told CNN’s Ed Lavandera, criticizing ERCOT and Republican leaders for not better preparing for the freeze.
Gov. Abbott said Wednesday afternoon that an investigation of ERCOT, Texas’ power supply operator, is slated to begin next week.
“That will begin a process where we fully evaluate exactly what was done, and maybe what was not done in both the decision process, as well as the action process by ERCOT, making sure that we get to the root of any missteps that took place, what was done what can be done better,” Abbott said.
The pressure facing ERCOT was underscored when it removed the bios of its executive team and board members because they were receiving threats, a spokesperson told CNN.
CNN’s Dave Alsup, Alisha Ebrahimji, Carma Hassan, Madeline Holcombe, Amanda Jackson, Ed Lavandera, Paul P. Murphy, Andy Rose, Raja Razek, Barbara Starr, Joe Sutton, Suzanne Presto and Christina Zdanowicz contributed to this report.
