Texas winter storm brings extreme cold, widespread power outages

As of Monday morning, it had been two weeks since Helen McCanick and her neighbors in Wharton, Texas, had running water. The freezing temperatures brought by Winter Storm Uri burst their pipes and broke the motor running their well.

McCanick has spent the days since the storm traversing neighboring towns, searching for the pipe and motor parts needed to restore her water. “I am very tired of running from place to place, I really am,” she said from the parking lot of yet another hardware store.

The power was still out in my Dallas housing complex early last Tuesday, so I grabbed the survival hatchet from my emergency bag to chop up a couple of fallen trees, which were covered with six inches of down-soft snow dropped by Winter Storm Uri.

The trees broke easily, and after 30 minutes of hacking, I’d cut enough for two small blazes. I divided the wood — one half for my apartment, the other for my neighbor.

My son noticed the rabbit tracks first. We woke up early the morning after Valentine’s Day to discover that the power was out in our home north of Austin, so my husband, 3-year-old son, and I walked to the back door and pulled the shade up to see what the winter storm had brought.

We were expecting some ice and snowfall, but as a born-and-raised Texan, I’d never witnessed the landscape transformed quite like this. I’d never seen rabbit tracks five inches deep in snow, or 12-inch icicles jutting down from a roof edge. That is, until the nearly weeklong Arctic blast of February 2021, when the state froze over, leaving millions of us shivering in our homes or cars or flocking to warming stations, wondering why a “rolling blackout” was lasting for days on end.

President Joe Biden approved a major disaster declaration for Texas, which has been devastated by the combination of a massive winter storm and an unprepared state electrical grid that caused widespread power outages for millions across the state, on Saturday.

“As I said when I ran, I’m going to be a president for all America — all,” Biden told reporters on Friday. “There’s no red or blue.”

An emerging political scandal over Ted Cruz’s alleged vacation plans is sweeping the internet amid fallout from Winter Storm Uri, which has left millions of Texans without electricity or running water for days now.

On Wednesday evening, political Twitter became obsessed with unconfirmed reports that the Texas senator flew to Cancun, Mexico, for a family vacation — reports that were confirmed on Thursday morning by Fox News and other outlets.

Millions of Texans have spent days in their homes without consistent access to power and water during extreme cold weather. Some have resorted to staying in hotels for heat and electricity, and mutual aid groups have also worked to relocate vulnerable or homeless residents to nearby hotels.

Over the past few days, local news outlets and social media users have noticed extremely high booking prices on hotel sites as demand spikes, which could be an indication of price gouging. NBC affiliate KXAN received emails from viewers showing that rooms were going for $500 to $999 per night in South Austin. On Twitter, users across the state claimed they saw rates between $400 and $700 a night on booking sites. Price gouging during and after a disaster is illegal under Texas state law, and officials have encouraged residents to report cases to the attorney general’s office.

A severe chill continues to grip millions of Americans this week after the massive Winter Storm Uri swept states from the South to the Great Plains to the Eastern Seaboard. The biting cold has burst water pipes and blocked gas pipelines, leaving millions in the dark, without heat and potable water while the winter air encroaches.

The cold coupled with power outages has forced some to retreat to warming shelters and others to deploy desperate tactics to stay warm like firing up grills in living rooms and chopping up furniture for firewood. But such measures brought their own problems, like carbon monoxide poisoning.

Extreme cold in Texas has left millions without consistent access to electricity and water for days. Residents are struggling with burst pipes and rolling power outages, amid heavy snowfall and near-freezing temperatures. People are reportedly boiling snow for water and burning clothes and furniture for warmth as resources remain scarce.

Over the past week, mutual aid groups across Texas have mobilized to feed, clothe, and house vulnerable residents, attracting the attention of in- and out-of-state donors on social media. In Austin, local volunteers worked to relocate the city’s homeless population inside hotel rooms, while collecting food and clothing donations. Organizers in Dallas have similarly coordinated a rehousing campaign during the storm, and crowdsourced transportation help to get people to “warming centers.” Mutual Aid Houston has closed its GoFundMe campaign, which received more than $130,000, and organizers plan to distribute the funds for community aid in the coming days.

Winter Storm Uri scattered bitter cold, snow, and ice this week across a huge swath of the United States, including places that rarely see such extreme low temperatures.

States like Texas with milder winters were caught off guard by the chill, which led to a massive spike in energy demand and a huge drop in available electricity as the infrastructure around natural gas, coal, nuclear, and wind energy froze up. Tuesday was the coldest day in North Texas in 72 years, with the Dallas-Fort Worth area reaching a record low temperature of minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit this week.

Texas entered its third full day cycling in and out of the dark after frigid temperatures triggered a power crisis early Monday morning. A staggering 3.4 million people were still without power on Wednesday morning after rain and snow pelted the state overnight. The state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, couldn’t project when the power would be restored.

When the cold front hit over the weekend, electricity use soared to heat buildings, but the grid couldn’t keep up with demand. Natural gas plants, which supply the majority of the state’s electricity, were not equipped to operate at such low temperatures. Despite widespread false claims spread on Fox News that frozen wind turbines were solely to blame for the blackout, failures at these gas plants are the main cause of the crisis, a spokesperson for ERCOT told Bloomberg.

Winter Storm Uri chilled large areas of the western, central, and southern US over the weekend, straining the power grid in some places so badly that millions of Americans have had to go without power in temperatures below freezing.

The National Weather Service on Monday reported that 150 million Americans were under various winter storm warnings, with heavy snow and ice still likely to sweep from the southern Plains, to the Ohio Valley, to the Northeast.