Some power restored in Texas but water woes persist
Electricity was restored to millions of Texans, but more than 800 water systems servicing nearly two-thirds of the state’s residents were disrupted, leaving millions without drinkable water.
Power began to flicker back on across much of Texas on Thursday, but millions across the state confronted another dire crisis: a shortage of drinkable water as pipes cracked, wells froze and water-treatment plants were knocked offline.
The problems were especially acute at hospitals. One, in Austin, was forced to move some of its most critically ill patients to another building when its faucets ran nearly dry. Another in Houston had to haul in water on trucks to flush toilets.
But for many of the state’s residents stuck at home, the emergency meant boiling the tap water that trickled through their faucets, scouring stores for bottled water, or boiling icicles and dirty snow on their stoves.
For others, it meant no water at all. Denise Gonzalez, 40, had joined a crowd at a makeshift relief center in a working-class corner of West Dallas on Thursday where volunteers handed out food from the luggage compartment of a charter bus.
Back at her apartment, she said, the lights were finally back on. But her pipes were frozen solid. She could not bathe, shower or use the toilet. She said she had been calling plumbers all day, but one of the few who answered told her it would be $3,000 to come out to assess the damage.
“If I had $3,000,” Gonzalez said, “I wouldn’t be getting food from people on the bus.”
Major disruptions to the Texas power grid left more than 4 million households without power this week, but by Thursday evening, only about 347,000 lacked electricity. Much of the statewide concern had
turned to water woes.
More than 800 public water systems serving 162 of the state’s 254 counties had been disrupted as of Thursday, affecting 13.1 million people, according to a spokeswoman for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
In Harris County, which includes Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, more than 1 million people have been affected by local water systems that have either issued notices to boil water so it is safe to drink or that cannot deliver water at all, said Brian Murray, a spokesman for the county emergency management agency.
Residents in the Texas capital, Austin, were also told to boil water because of a power failure at the city’s largest water-treatment facility. The director of Austin Water, Greg Meszaros, said that plummeting temperatures caused water mains to break and pipes to burst, spurring an increase in water usage and allowing water to leak out of the system.
He said Thursday that power had been restored, and that restoring water service to hospitals and other health care facilities was a priority. The city’s reservoirs, which can hold about 100 million gallons of water – or a day’s worth of water for Austin – had been nearly emptied because of the leaks or the increased use by residents.
“We never imagined a day where hospitals wouldn’t have water,” he said.
For many Texans, the disruptions were a staggering inconvenience that seemed to push them back to the state’s frontier past. People hunted for firewood across suburban yards, shivered in dark homes, lived off canned food, and went without electronics.
Others faced more dire consequences. At St. David’s South Austin Medical Center, officials were trying Wednesday night to fix a heating system that was failing because of low water pressure. They were forced to seek portable toilets and distribute bottles of water to patients and employees so they could wash their hands.
In San Antonio, Jesse Singh, 58, a Shell gas station owner, said his 80year-old father was turned away from regularly scheduled dialysis treatments Tuesday and Thursday because his clinic was having water access issues. “It’s a dangerous situation,” Singh said.
Compounding the problem was the fact that much of Texas was still experiencing cold weather and snowstorms Thursday, part of a havoc-inducing bout of winter weather that also dumped snow and prompted winter storm warnings in New York,
New Jersey and Connecticut through Friday night.
Corey Brown, an employee at Tyler Water Utilities – which serves the city of Tyler in the northeast part of Texas – said the temperature was in the 20s Thursday, which complicated efforts to restore water service. Brown guessed that half the utility’s 110,000 customers were completely without water.
“They had freezing water lines,” he said. “We have two water plants – one of them went down, and we also have power outages. And then we had a hard freeze the last couple of days, so as a result a lot of the pipes are freezing over and that is stopping flow to some people’s houses or causing low pressure.”
Days of glacial weather have left at least 38 people dead nationwide, made many roads impassable, disrupted vaccine distribution and blanketed nearly three-quarters of the continental United States in snow. Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said they had made 60 generators available “to support critical infrastructure” in Texas and were providing the state blankets, bottled water and meals.
The head of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid, warned Thursday that the state was “not out of the woods yet,” due largely to the enduring cold.
“We’re still in very cold conditions, so we’re still seeing much higher than normal winter demand,” Bill Magness, the council’s president and chief executive, said at a news conference. That meant, he said, that planned outages could be necessary in coming days to keep the grid stable.
“If we do hit a bump and have some generation have to come back off, we may have to ask for outages,” he said. “But if we do, we believe they will be at the level where they could be rotating outages, not the larger numbers that we faced earlier this week.”
There were other signs of progress. William P. Hobby Airport in Houston, which had been forced to shut down Wednesday because of water supply issues, announced early Thursday morning that it had restored water in a limited capacity, and that flights would resume.
But even as the power flickered back on for many Texans, thousands more continued on with neither light nor water. For Angelina
Diaz and her four children, Thursday was yet another day of shuttling between their cold house in West Dallas and the cramped SUV idling in the driveway.
It was Day 4 without a shower or baths. Day 4 with no toilet. Day 4 of warming up bottled water on a barbecue grill to make the formula for Diaz’s 6-month-old daughter, Jimena.
The family has spent nearly a year zealously washing their hands to avoid contracting the coronavirus, and they worried that a week without water would undo those efforts.
“How do we keep our hands clean?” Diaz, 25, asked.
Most of their neighbors had electricity by Thursday afternoon, but as utility trucks drove through the slush, Diaz was losing her patience with sleeping in the car and shivering under blankets. She was enticed by hotels or city-run warming centers but worried too much about exposing her family to the virus. So it was back to the SUV to wait.
At the Family Place, a domestic violence shelter in Dallas, the power had been out for two days when the waterlogged ceiling caved in, unleashing a freezing waterfall onto the 120 women and children seeking refuge there.
The water soaked their clothes and the few possessions they had brought, spoiling hard-to-replace legal documents. The hallways became streams. The residents and staff members tried to sweep out the water and piled up bedsheets to create dams, but soon gave up and hurriedly piled into five city buses to seek shelter at a church.
“They lost basically everything,” Shelbi Driver, a resident advocate at the shelter, said.
Advocates said at least three other domestic violence shelters around Dallas were also evacuated after pipes burst and flooded their hallways with frigid water, displacing hundreds of vulnerable people who did not have the option of going home.
“They went through one horrible trauma, came to our organization to get safe and had another trauma,” Paige Flink, chief executive of the Family Place, said. “It makes me want to cry just to say it,” she said. “It is a total nightmare.”
The deaths stacked up: a policeman shot dead with a pistol equipped with a silencer, a local official gunned down, his son wounded, an Iraqi man beheaded. In total, 20 men and women were killed last month in the sprawling camp in northeastern Syria housing families of the Islamic State group.
The slayings in al-Hol camp — nearly triple the deaths in previous months — are largely believed to have been carried out by IS militants punishing perceived enemies and intimidating anyone who wavers from their extremist line, say Syrian Kurdish officials who run the camp but say they struggle to keep it under control.
The jump in violence has heightened calls for countries to repatriate their citizens languishing in the camp, home to some 62,000 people. Those repatriations have slowed dramatically because of the coronavirus epidemic, officials say. If left there, the thousands of children in the camp risk being radicalized, local and U.N. officials warn.
“Al-Hol will be the womb that will give birth to new generations of extremists,” said Abdullah Suleiman Ali, a Syrian researcher who focuses on jihadi groups.
It has been nearly two years since the U.S.-led coalition captured the last sliver of territory held by the Islamic State group, ending their self-declared caliphate that covered large parts of
Iraq and Syria. The brutal war took several years and left U.S.-allied Kurdish authorities in control of eastern and northeast Syria, with a small presence of several hundred American forces still deployed there.
Since then, remaining IS militants have gone underground in the Syrian-Iraqi border region, continuing an insurgency. Though attacks in Syria are lower than they were in late 2019, IS sleeper cells continue to strike Syrian government troops, forces of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and civilian administrators.
Al-Hol houses the wives, widows, children and other family members of IS militants — more than 80% of its 62,000 residents are women and children. The majority are Iraqis and Syrians, but it includes some 10,000 people from 57 other countries, housed in a highly secured separate area known as the Annex. Many of them remain die-hard IS supporters.
The camp has long been chaotic, with the hardcore
militants among its population enforcing their will on others and seeking to prevent them from cooperating with Kurdish authorities guarding it.
IS cells in Syria are in contact with residents of the camp and support them, said a senior Kurdish official Badran Cia Kurd. “Anyone who tries to reveal these contacts or stops dealing with Daesh is subjected to death,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for IS.
The U.S.-backed SDF tweeted last week that, backed by air surveillance from the coalition, they detained an IS family smuggler in the area of Hadadia near the camp.
“There are several reasons behind the increase of crime including attempts by Daesh members to impose their ideology in the camp against civilians who reject it,” said Ali, the researcher.
Of the 20 killings at alHol in January, at least five of the dead were female residents of the camp, according to the Rojava Information Center, an activist collective that tracks news in areas controlled by the SDF. All the victims were Syrian or Iraqi citizens, including a member of the local police force, and most were killed in their tents or shelters at night, RIC said.
Most of the victims were shot in the back of their heads at close range, according to RIC and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britainbased opposition war monitor.
On Jan. 9, a gunman killed a policeman in the camp using a silencerequipped pistol, then as other police chased him, he threw a hand grenade that seriously wounded the patrol commander, the Observatory said. The same day, an official with a local council dealing with Syrian civilians in the camp was shot to death and his son critically wounded.
In another case, an Iraqi camp resident was decapitated, his head found some distance from his body, RIC reported. It is believed he was killed on suspicion he was cooperating with authorities.
The immediate cause for the jump in killings was not known. In November, Kurdish authorities began an amnesty program for the 25,000 Syrian citizens in the camp, allowing them to leave. Some speculate that, since those taking amnesty must register and work with authorities, the program may have prompted slayings to keep residents in line. Many Syrians fear leaving the camp because they may face revenge attacks in their hometowns from those who suffered under IS rule.
Gov. Ron DeSantis sent a message to locals looking to get extra COVID-19 vaccine doses: Kiss the ring, or else.
DeSantis stopped in Manatee County Wednesday to announce a pop-up vaccination spot for 3,000 seniors at a planned community called Lakewood Ranch. The catch: only residents of two ZIP codes qualified. Those areas are predominantly white and well-off — and the least impacted by COVID-19 in the county.
But local officials and residents had better be grateful the great governor bestowed such honor on the county. And they’d better stop complaining that Manatee’s wealthiest residents are getting VIP access to shots when poorer, non-white residents have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus.
“If Manatee County doesn’t like us doing this, then we are totally fine putting this in counties that want it. We’re totally happy to do that,” DeSantis said during a news conference. “Anyone that’s saying that, let us know if you want us to send it Sarasota or Charlotte or Pasco or wherever. Let us know — we’re happy to do it.
“There’s folks that are going to complain about getting vaccines. I’ll tell you what, I’d be thankful because you know what? We didn’t need to do this at all. We saw a need and wanted to get the numbers up for seniors.”
DeSantis was responding to criticism from some Manatee County commissioners who were concerned about the optics of picking and choosing who gets the vaccine.
For DeSantis, there’s nothing to see here — that the organizers of the vaccine pop-up are politically connected, nor that the Manatee commissioner who helped organize the pop-up, Vanessa Baugh, made sure she and the developer of Lakewood Ranch were on the list of people with priority for the vaccine, as the Bradenton Herald reported.
DeSantis contends the point of the pop-up was to get vaccines in the arms of as many seniors as possible, and that the 3,000 shots administered were in addition to the county’s regular allotment. He boasted during a news conference Thursday that 80% of Florida’s vaccines have gone to seniors.
Vaccinating seniors is a noble goal and getting doses to almost 5 million Floridians ages 65 and up is no easy task. But DeSantis’ combativeness with critics and the media during the COVID crisis is not new. The only accep
table narrative, in his view, is that he’s a champion of the people, there’s nothing to fix about vaccinations and the pandemic is under control in Florida ( and if anything goes wrong, blame it on the Biden White House).
In his searches for glowing reviews in the past, DeSantis and his administration have withheld information about cases in nursing homes and schools early in the pandemic (they changed course after legal pressure), and instructed county-level spokespeople from the Department of Health to stop issuing public statements about COVID-19 until after the Nov. 3 election, as the Sun Sentinel reported.
Right now, though infections and hospitalizations are down in Florida after a January peak, we are ground zero for the more transmissible U.K. variant., which is expected to become the predominant strain of the coronavirus in the state by March.
DeSantis gets plenty of compliments when he goes on Fox News (he was on Fox & Friends Thursday with a World War II veteran who’s believed to be the 2-millionth senior to get vaccinated in the state).
The governor of the nation’s third largest state will be criticized from time to time. The last things Floridians need is a politician with a hurt ego retaliating against critics by withholding life-saving vaccines.
We have a winner, folks, and it’s not Florida’s Marco
Rubio.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, despite strong competition from Miami, wins the title of Worst Cuban American in Congress.
The Republican — who along with Rubio made history in 2016 as the first serious Cuban American contenders for the White House — has abandoned his home state in the middle of a crisis.
Millions of his constituents are suffering through a devastating winter storm that left massive power outages and people scrambling for basic needs — with no electricity, no water and freezing temperatures. President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency.
And where’s Cruz?
The anti-immigrant right-winger ran off to Mexico.
He’s living it up in Cancun at a resort with his straw bag-toting wife, Heidi, and their kids.
They were photographed at a United Airlines lounge, in the plane and at an immigration line by travelers who posted their photos on Twitter.
Imagine Florida politicians leaving after a hurricane has devastated the state and at least 20 people have died, as has happened during Texas’ snowstorm.
Not even Rubio would flee a state in such need, or...would he?
HIS ‘EAT, PRAY, LOVE MOMENT’
Only days before the trip, hypocrite Cruz told Texans on a radio show: “I was speaking this weekend with the meteorologist expert who was saying the combination of these two storms, we could see up to 100 people lose their lives this week in Texas. So don’t risk it. Keep your family safe and just stay home and hug your kids.”
Along with all the outrage he deserves, the desertion has made Cruz, 50, the butt of jokes on the Internet.
There’s no problem with Cruz leaving, said a Democratic
strategist. The problem is his returning.
Tweeted anonymous @TrashPandaFTW: “The irony that he freaks out about immigrants coming up from Mexico ruining the country but flees to Mexico when things go to shit in Texas.”
He got more than
15,000 likes.
Comedian Blaire Erskine brilliantly spoofed Cruz by pretending to be his spokeswoman.
“Why can’t he have his eat, pray, love moment like everybody else can?” she said in a video posted on Twitter.
Tweet from Ted Cruz spokeswoman on Cancun trip
Oh, Texas, you’re as loony as Floriduh.
Maybe the senator was too tired from spreading false claims of election fraud, too worn out from inciting white supremacists to riot. Trying to overthrow a fair and democratic election can be exhausting.
All of it is vintage Cruz, the Cuban evangelist’s son whom former House Speaker John Boehner dubbed when he was running for president as “Lucifer in the flesh.”
This is the same Cruz who said he wouldn’t be “a servile puppy” to Donald Trump but then proceeded to become just that (with apologies to puppies) for four years and counting.
We could’ve all been so proud to say in Miami that two Cuban Americans made it to highest echelons in U.S. politics, but over and over again, their service as senators has been worthless.
Cruz, however, wins the prize for dereliction of basic duty to vacation, like a teenager on spring break, in a foreign beach town.
The seditious senator who fled to Cancun is the Worst Cuban American in Congress.