Water is slowly returning to jeans for almost a week after an unprecedented winter storm caused widespread power outages and caused water problems for millions. More than 14 million people are still without water or are under boiling water warnings.
“We’ve seen the total population affected by this decline to about 14.3 million, where it was close to 14.9 million yesterday,” Toby Baker, executive director of the Texas Environmental Quality Commission, said Saturday . Waterless residents fell from 350,000 to about 156,000 overnight, he said.
Texas public water systems are any system that has more than 15 connections, a total of about 7,000 systems, making returning water to residents primarily a local responsibility, according to Baker. “They’re not necessarily the size of Houston, nor the size of Austin, they’re also rural connections and rural water systems,” he explained.
Through mobile labs and collaborations with EPA labs, neighboring states and large municipalities, Texas has identified enough facilities to test samples from more than 1,000 systems that are still under a boiling water warning, according to Baker .
“Right now we have the capacity in these labs to handle the samples needed to lift the boiling water warnings,” Baker said.
“My hope is that we’ve gotten the worst and stabilized, and now we’re just coming out of the hole we are.”
As of Saturday morning, the storm had been linked to at least 27 deaths in the state, and food and drinking water were scarce for many.
Baker said the state had never seen any winter weather event of this magnitude. “We’re not the Northeast, we’re not Minnesota,” he said, calling the storm a “huge learning experience.”
“If this happens again in our lives, we will be prepared for it,” Baker said.
A “complete overhaul” of regulations has been called for that left millions of people powerless for days. Gov. Greg Abbott has issued an executive order adding emergency elements to the state legislative session asking the legislature to investigate ERCOT’s preparedness and response to the storm.
Texas Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd criticized the state’s lack of drinking water. “There needs to be more locations across the state, both locally and statewide, where resources are organized or stored before the event,” Kidd said.
“Without funnels, we have a very limited supply at the local government level of cities that only have warehouses full of bottled water that are owned by the city or that have food prepared for local government, which they normally don’t have exists,” he said. . We rely on the private sector for our daily needs. ”
President Joe Biden has it he declared that Texas is experiencing a major disaster. People from 77 of the state’s 254 counties will be eligible for federal funding to assist in recovery efforts. Assistance includes subsidies for temporary housing and home repairs, as well as “low-cost loans” to cover losses on unsecured property, the White House said in a statement on Saturday.
Li Cohen contributed to the reports.