DALLAS (AP) – Warmer temperatures spread across the southern United States on Saturday, providing some relief to a tired winter region facing challenging cleanup and costly repairs since days of extreme cold and widespread power outages.
In Texas, where millions were warned to boil tap water before drinking it, the warm-up was expected to last several days. The thaw caused pipe explosions across the region, adding to the list of serious condition problems that were blamed for more than 70 deaths.
On Saturday afternoon, the sun had risen in Dallas and temperatures were approaching the 1950s. People came up to stroll and jog through residential neighborhoods after days indoors. Many roads had dried up and the snow spots were melting. The snowmen fell.
Linda Nguyen woke up Saturday morning in a Dallas hotel room with a guarantee she hadn’t had in nearly a week: she and her cat had a place to sleep with running water.
Electricity had been restored to his apartment on Wednesday, but when Nguyen arrived home from work the next evening he found a wet carpet. A pipe had exploded in his bedroom.
“It’s essentially unlivable,” said Nguyen, 27, who works in real estate. “Everything is completely ruined.”
Among the deaths attributed to the weather is a man at an Abilene health center, where lack of water pressure made medical treatment impossible. Officials also reported deaths from hypothermia, including homeless people and those inside buildings without electricity or heat. Others died in traffic accidents on icy roads or from alleged carbon monoxide poisoning.
About half of the deaths reported so far have occurred in Texas, with multiple fatalities also in Tennessee, Kentucky, Oregon and some other southern and midwestern states.
A Tennessee farmer died trying to save two calves from an icy pond.
President Joe Biden’s office said Saturday it declared a major disaster in Texas, directing federal agencies to aid in recovery.
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, tweeted Saturday that she helped raise more than $ 3 million to help them. He was asking for help from a food bank in Houston, one of 12 organizations in Texas that he said would benefit from the donations.
The storms left more than 300,000 people without electricity across the country on Saturday, many of them in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
More than 50,000 Oregon electricity customers were among those without electricity, more than a week after an ice storm hit the power grid. Portland General Electric expected to have service back to all customers less than 15,000 by Friday night, but the company discovered additional damage in areas that were previously inaccessible.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown ordered the National Guard to go door-to-door in some areas to check on the well-being of residents. At its peak, the worst ice storm in 40 years brought power to more than 350,000.
In West Virginia, Appalachian Power in West Virginia was working on a list of about 1,500 sites in need of repair, as some 44,000 customers in the state ran out of electricity after experiencing back-to-back ice storms on February 11. and on February 15th. More than 3,200 workers were trying to regain power online, on Saturday their efforts spread to the six most affected counties.
In Wayne County, West Virginia, workers had to replace the same stick three times because the trees kept falling on it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott met with lawmakers Saturday to discuss energy prices, reporters Nim Kidd, head of Texas’ Emergency Management Division, told reporters. Some jeans could face large rises in electricity bills after wholesale energy prices skyrocketed.
Water problems added misery to southerners who went without heat or electricity for days after ice and snow storms forced them to shut down from Minnesota to Texas.
Robert Tuskey was retrieving tools from the back of his van Saturday afternoon as he prepared to fix a water line at a friend’s home in Dallas.
“Everything has frozen,” Tuskey said. “I even had one in my house … of course I’m lucky to be a plumber.”
Tuskey, 49, said his plumbing business has had a string of calls for help from friends and explosive tube relationships. “I’m arranging to go help another family member,” he said. “I know they don’t have money, but they don’t have water and they’re bigger.”
In Jackson, Mississippi, most of the city, with approximately 161,000 people, had no running water and officials blamed the city’s water systems that are more than 100 years old and not built for the weather. icy.
The city provided water for washing toilets and drinking, but residents had to collect it, leaving the elderly and those living on icy roads vulnerable.
Water pressure problems caused Memphis International Airport to cancel all inbound and outbound flights on Friday, but the passenger terminal was expected to reopen in the mid-afternoon on Saturday.
Prisoners’ advocates said Louisiana prisons and prisons had intermittent electricity in some facilities and frozen pipes affecting toilets and showers.
According to Voice of the Experienced, a grassroots organization founded and run by people who were previously imprisoned, inmates who were sick, elderly, or not in dormitories but in cell blocks (small spaces surrounded by concrete walls) were especially vulnerable. The group said a man at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, just south of Baton Rouge, described a thin layer of ice on its walls.
Cammie Maturin said she spoke to men at the Louisiana State Prison at 6,300 inmates in Angola, who were not given any additional provisions to protect themselves from the cold.
“They don’t give them extra blankets. There is nothing else, for them, it has only been for yourselves, ”said Maturin, president of the non-profit HOPE Foundation.
In many areas, water pressure dropped after the lines froze and because people left the taps dripping to prevent the pipes from forming icy, authorities said.
As of Saturday, 1,445 Texas public water systems had reported disrupted operations, said Toby Baker of the state’s environmental quality division. Government agencies used mobile labs and coordinated to speed up water testing.
That tops 1,300 information issues Friday afternoon, but Baker said the number of affected customers has dropped by about 600,000 to 14.3 million.
“It looks like last night we may have seen some stabilization in water systems across the state,” Baker said.
Saturday’s thaw after eleven days of freezing temperatures in Oklahoma City left residents with exploded water pipes, inoperable wells and unused ovens due to brief power outages.
Memphis Rhodes College said Friday that about 700 residential students had been relocated to hotels in the suburbs of Germantown and Collierville after school restrooms stopped working due to low water pressure.
Firefighters extinguished a fire at a 102-room, fully-occupied hotel in Killeen, Texas, about 110 miles north of Austin, late Friday. The hotel’s sprinkler system did not work due to the frozen pipes, authorities said on Saturday.
The flames erupted from the top of the four-story hotel and three people needed medical attention. The displaced guests were taken to a nearby Baptist church.
Texas power grid operators said electricity transmission returned to normal after the historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures created an increase in demand that slowed the state system.
Small interruptions remained, but Bill Magness, chairman of Texas Electric Reliability Council, said the grid can now provide power to the entire system.
Abbott ordered an investigation into the failure of a state known as the U.S. energy capital. ERCOT officials have defended their preparations and the decision to start forced carvings on Monday as the network reached the breaking point.
The blackouts led to a lawsuit filed Friday in a Nueces County court in Corpus Christi, alleging that ERCOT ignored repeated warnings of weaknesses in the state’s electrical infrastructure.
A Dallas law firm claimed that ERCOT and the American power company Electric Power caused property damage and commercial disruptions during the cold snap.
In addition, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued civil investigation lawsuits to ERCOT and electrical service companies. His research will address power outages, emergency plans, energy prices and other aspects related to the winter storm.
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Scolforo reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
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Associated Press reporters Gillian Flaccus in Portland; Ellen Knickmeyer in Oklahoma City; Jim Mustian in New York, Terry Wallace in Dallas; Jonathan Cooper in Phoenix; and Kimberlee Kruesi in Boise, Idaho; contributed.