Power crisis turns into water crisis for stormstruck states
AUSTIN, Texas — States slammed by winter storms that left millions without power for days have traded one crisis for another: Broken water pipes brought on by recordlow temperatures have created a shortage of clean drinking water, shut down airports on Friday and left hospitals struggling to maintain sanitary conditions.
Texas authorities ordered 7 million people — a quarter of the population of the nation’s secondlargest 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. Memphis International Airport canceled all incoming and outgoing passenger flights Friday due to water pressure issues.
And 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, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said.
“We are dealing with an extreme challenge with getting more water through our distribution system,” he said.
The city was providing water for toilets and drinking, but residents had to drive to pick it up — leaving older people and those on icy roads vulnerable.
The water woes were the latest misery for residents left without heat or electricity for days after ice and snowstorms swept through early in the week, forcing utilities from Minnesota to Texas to implement rolling blackouts to ease strained power grids.
Texas’ grid operators said Friday that the state’s electrical system returned to normal for the first time since soaring demand to heat homes buckled the power grid and knocked out service to more than 4 million customers. Smaller outages remained, but Bill Magness, president of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said the grid now has enough capacity to provide power throughout the entire system.
Gov. Greg Abbott ordered an investigation into the failure in the energy capital of the U.S., while ERCOT officials have defended their preparations and the decision to begin forced outages early Monday as the grid reached a breaking point.
The storms also left more than 330,000 from Virginia to Louisiana without power, and about 60,000 in Oregon on Friday were still enduring a weeklong outage following a massive snow and ice storm.
The weather was blamed for the deaths of at least 69 people.