(GNB Desk): Millions of Texans had their power restored on Thursday after days of living in the dark in a devastating week of freezing temperatures and winter storms. Early in the morning yesterday, nearly a half-million residents were without electricity but by midday, just under 350,000 remained without power, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages across the country.
While power has been restored to millions in Texas, nearly half of residents, 13 million, don’t have access to clean, running water.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages most of the state power grid, said Thursday morning it had “made significant progress overnight restoring customer power, although some outages still remain throughout the state.”
Texas’ electrical system was “seconds or minutes” from collapsing and plunging the state into the dark for months, the power grid’s operators said Thursday while defending their decision to initiate controlled outages.
“Our frequency went to a level that, if operators had not acted very rapidly … it could have very quickly changed,” said Bill Magness, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the agency that oversees the grid.
However, ERCOT noted that despite bringing the lights back on, energy emergency conditions remain as the grid operator and transmission owners work to restore the remaining customers that are without power.
“We’re to the point in the load restoration where we are allowing transmission owners to bring back any load they can related to this load shed event,” said ERCOT Senior Director of System Operations Dan Woodfin.
“We will keep working around the clock until every single customer has their power back on,” Woodfin said.
Areas where distribution systems were damaged by ice storms may still be experiencing loss of power, according to ERCOT. Additionally, large industrial facilities that voluntarily went offline to help alleviate pressure on the overloaded power grid may also remain without power.
CenterPoint Energy tweeted “As we continue repairing equipment damaged by severe weather, we ask that you continue conserving electricity – lower your thermostat & avoid using appliances.”
As of 5 p.m. local time on Thursday, approximately 20,000 outages remained, NPR reported.
Some 7 million residents of Houston, Arlington, Fort Worth and Tyler have been ordered to boil their drinking water after the outages knocked treatment plants offline, according to NPR report.
The state capital’s water supply lost 325 million gallons in Austin alone due to burst pipes, Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros said during a press conference Thursday.
“We know that there are tens of thousands of leaks,” Meszaros said. “As the fire department indicated they have responded to thousands upon thousands of burst pipes.”
At the peak from Tuesday night into Wednesday, the system lost 325 million gallons, he said to the media.
“That is an incredible amount of water. Nothing I’ve ever seen before,” Meszaros said during press conference.
In Houston, America’s fourth-largest city, there are long lines for food, gas and supplies. Things are also bad in Oklahoma, where President Biden declared a state of emergency after the longest stretch of sub-zero temperatures there on record. At least 34 deaths were attributed to the storm, 20 of them were from Texas.
The winter weather also created a political storm. Texas Senator Ted Cruz was criticized for flying to Cancun with his family this week, while his constituents suffered in record-low temperatures.
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