DALLAS (AP) – Higher temperatures spread across the southern United States on Saturday, relieving a winter-weary region facing challenging clean-up and expensive repairs after days of extreme cold and widespread power outages.
In hard-hit Texas, where millions were warned to boil tap water before drinking it, warming was expected to take several days. The thaw caused burst pipes across the region, adding to the list of woes from dire circumstances blamed for more than 70 deaths.
By Saturday afternoon, the sun had risen in Dallas and temperatures were approaching the 1950s. People came to residential areas after days of walking and jogging indoors. Many roads were dried up and the snow melted. Snowmen collapsed.
Linda Nguyen woke up Saturday morning in a Dallas hotel room with an insurance policy she hadn’t had in nearly a week: She and her cat had to sleep somewhere with electricity and water.
Electricity in her apartment was restored on Wednesday. But when Nguyen came home from work the next evening, she found a soggy carpet. A pipe had burst in her bedroom.
“It’s essentially unlivable,” says Nguyen, 27, who works in real estate. “Everything is completely ruined.”
Deaths attributed to the weather include a man in a hospital in Abilene where medical treatment was made impossible due to the lack of water pressure. Officials also reported deaths from hypothermia, including homeless people and people in buildings without power or heating. Others were killed in car accidents on icy roads or from suspected carbon monoxide poisoning.
About half of the deaths reported so far have occurred in Texas, with multiple fatalities, including in Tennessee, Kentucky, Oregon, and a few other southern and midwestern states.
A Tennessee farmer died trying to rescue two calves from a frozen pond.
President Joe Biden’s office said Saturday that he has declared a major disaster in Texas, leading federal agencies to aid in the recovery.
U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, tweeted Saturday that she helped raise more than $ 3 million for relief. She sought help for a Houston food bank, one of 12 organizations in Texas that she said would benefit from the donations.
The storms left more than 300,000 people across the country without power on Saturday, many of them in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
More than 50,000 Oregon electricity customers were among those without power, more than a week after an ice storm hit the power grid. Portland General Electric had hoped to have service back to all but 15,000 customers by Friday night. But the utility found additional damage in previously inaccessible areas.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown ordered the National Guard to go door-to-door in some areas to monitor the welfare of residents. At its peak, which was the worst ice storm in 40 years, power went out to more than 350,000 customers.
In West Virginia, Appalachian Power worked on a list of about 1,500 places to be repaired as about 44,000 customers in the state were without electricity after experiencing ice storms that hit each other on February 11 and February 15. More than 3,200 workers tried to get the power back online, their efforts spread across the six most affected provinces on Saturday.
In Wayne County, West Virginia, workers had to replace the same post three times because trees kept falling on it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott met with lawmakers from both sides on Saturday to discuss energy prices as Texans face massive spikes in their electricity bills after wholesale energy prices skyrocketed while power plants were offline.
“We have a responsibility to protect Texans from spikes in their energy bills” as a result of the weather, he said in a statement.
Water problems caused more misery for people in the South who were without heating or electricity for days after the ice. Snow storms caused power outages from Minnesota to Texas.
Robert Tuskey pulled tools from the back of his pickup truck Saturday afternoon as he prepared to fix a water pipe at a friend’s house in Dallas.
“Everything is frozen,” said Tuskey. “I even had one in my own house … of course I’m lucky to be a plumber.”
Tuskey, 49, said his plumbing company has received a flood of requests for help from friends and family members with burst pipes. “I’m about to help another family member,” he said. “I know she has no money at all, but they have no water at all, and they are older.”
In Jackson, Mississippi, most of the city with about 161,000 had no running water, and officials blamed the city water pipes being over 100 years old and not built for freezing weather.
The city provided water to flush toilets and to drink. But residents had to pick it up, leaving the elderly and those living on icy roads vulnerable.
Inbound and outbound passenger flights at Memphis International Airport resumed Saturday after all flights were canceled on Friday due to water pressure issues. The problems were not resolved, but airport officials have set up temporary toilets.
Prison rights advocates said some Louisiana correctional facilities had intermittent electricity and frozen pipes, affecting toilets and showers.
The men who are sick or elderly or held not in dormitories but in cell blocks – small spaces surrounded by concrete walls – were particularly vulnerable, according to Voice of the Experienced, a grassroots organization founded and led by previously inmates. The group said a man at the 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 in the 6,300 Louisiana State Penitentiary inmates in Angola who were not given extra amenities to protect themselves from the cold.
‘They don’t give them extra blankets. Nothing extra. For them, it’s just taking care of yourself, ”said Maturin, president of the non-profit HOPE Foundation.
In many areas, water pressure dropped after pipes froze and because people dripped faucets to keep the pipes from freezing, authorities said.
On Saturday, 1,445 public water systems in Texas had reported disrupted operation, said Toby Baker, director of the state commission on environmental quality. Government agencies used mobile laboratories and coordinated to speed up water testing.
That’s more than 1,300 reports on Friday afternoon. But Baker said the number of customers affected had fallen slightly. Most were under boiling water, with 156,000 no water at all.
“It looks like we saw some stabilization in the water systems in the state last night,” said Baker.
Saturday’s thaw after 11 days of freezing temperatures in Oklahoma City left residents with blown water pipes, inoperable wells and furnaces inoperative due to brief power outages.
Rhodes College in Memphis said on Friday that about 700 residential students were moved to hotels in the suburbs of Germantown and Collierville after school toilets stopped functioning due to low water pressure.
Firefighters put out a fire at a fully occupied 102-room hotel in Killeen, Texas, about 70 miles north of Austin, late Friday. The hotel’s sprinkler system was not working due to frozen pipes, authorities said Saturday.
Flames shot from the top of the four-story hotel and three people required medical attention. Displaced guests were taken to a nearby Baptist church.
Texas power grid operators said electricity transmission returned to normal after historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures caused a surge in demand that shrank the state’s system.
Smaller outages persisted, but Bill Magness, president of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said the power grid can now power the entire system.
Abbott ordered an investigation into the failure of a state known as America’s energy capital. ERCOT officials have defended their preparations and the decision to start forced out on Monday as it just hit breaking point.
The blackouts resulted in at least two lawsuits against ERCOT and utilities, including one brought by the family of an 11-year-old boy who is believed to have died of hypothermia. The lawsuits allege that ERCOT ignored repeated warnings about weaknesses in the state’s electricity infrastructure.
Also, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has placed civil investigation requirements on ERCOT and electric utilities. His research will cover power outages, contingency plans, energy prices and more related to the winter storm.
Scolforo reported from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Associated Press journalists Gillian Flaccus in Portland, Oregon; Ellen Knickmeyer in Oklahoma City; Jim Mustian in New York; Terry Wallace in Dallas; Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix; and Kimberlee Kruesi in Boise, Idaho contributed.