Storm-hit U.S. cities grapple with water shortage
Millions of Texans issued boil water advisories amid heat, power outage woes
Southern cities slammed by winter storms that left millions without power for days have traded one crisis for another: busted water pipes ruptured by record-low temperatures have created a shortage of clean drinking water, shut down the Memphis airport on Friday and left hospitals struggling to maintain sanitary conditions.
Texas authorities ordered seven million people — a quarter of the population in the nation’s second-largest state — to boil tap water before drinking it because low water pressure could have allowed bacteria to seep into the system. A man died at an Abilene health-care facility when a lack of water pressure made medical treatment impossible.
About 260,000 homes and businesses in Tennessee’s largest county, which includes Memphis, were told to boil water because of water main ruptures and problems at pumping stations. Restaurants that can’t do so or don’t have bottled water were ordered to close. And water pressure problems prompted Memphis International Airport to cancel all incoming and outgoing Friday flights.
In Jackson, Miss., most of the city of about 161,000 had no running water. Crews pumped water to refill city tanks, but faced a shortage of chemicals for treatment because icy roads made it difficult for distributors to deliver them, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said.
“We are dealing with an extreme challenge with getting more water through our distribution system,” Lumumba said. The city was providing water for flushing toilets and drinking, but residents had to drive to pick it up — leaving seniors and those living on icy roads vulnerable.
Lisa Thomas said her driveway on a hill in Jackson was a sheet of ice. Her husband, who is on a defibrillator and heart monitor, is running out of his heart medication, with only enough to get him through Sunday because she hasn’t been able to go to the pharmacy. “People are in dire need here,” Thomas said.
The water woes were the latest misery for residents left without heat or electricity for days after ice and snow storms swept through early in the week, forcing utilities from Minnesota to Texas to implement rolling blackouts to ease strained power grids.
Texas electrical grid operators said Friday that transmission had returned to normal for the first time since a storm knocked out power to more than four million customers.
The storms also left more than 330,000 from Virginia to Louisiana without power and about 71,000 in Oregon on Friday were still enduring a weeklong outage following a massive ice and snow storm.
The extreme weather was blamed for the deaths of at least 59 people.