South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Cold-weary South begins to thaw
Challenges plentiful in the wake of wild winter weather
Challenges plentiful in the wake of wild winter weather that left cleanup and expensive repairs.
By Jake Bleiberg and Mark Scolforo
DALLAS — Warmer temperatures spread across the southern United States on Saturday, bringing some relief to a winter weary region that faces a challenging clean-up and expensive repairs from days of extreme cold and widespread power outages.
In hard-hit Texas, where millions were warned to boil tap water before drinking it, the warm-up was expected to last for several days. The thaw produced burst pipes throughout the region, adding to the list of woes from severe conditions that were blamed for at least 69 deaths.
By Saturday afternoon, the sun had come out in Dallas and temperatures were nearing the 50s.
Linda Nguyen woke up in a Dallas hotel room Saturday morning with an assurance she hadn’t had in nearly a week: she and her cat had somewhere to sleep with power and water.
Electricity had been restored to her apartment Wednesday, but when Nguyen arrived home from work the next evening she found a soaked carpet. A pipe had burst in her bedroom.
“It’s essentially unlivable,” said Nguyen, 27, who works in real estate. “Everything is completely ruined.”
Roughly half the deaths reported so far occurred in Texas, with multiple fatalities also in Tennessee, Kentucky, Oregon and a few other Southern and Midwestern states.
President Joe Biden’s office said Saturday he has declared a major disaster in Texas, directing federal agencies to help in the recovery.
The storms left more than 300,000 still without power across the country 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 ravaged the electrical grid. Portland General Electric had hoped to have service back to all but 15,000 customers by Friday night. But the utility discovered additional damage in previously inaccessible areas.
In West Virginia, Appalachian Power was working on a list of about 1,500 places that needed repair, as about 44,000 customers in the state remained without electricity after experiencing backto-back ice storms Feb. 11 and Feb. 15. More than 3,200 workers were attempting to get power back online, their efforts spread across the six most affected counties on Saturday.
In Wayne County, West Virginia, workers had to replace the same pole three times because trees kept falling on it.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott met Saturday with legislators to discuss energy prices, Nim Kidd, head of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, told reporters. Some Texans could be facing massive spikes in electric bills after wholesale energy prices skyrocketed.
Meanwhile, a U.S. senator is calling for federal investigations into possible price gouging of natural gas in the Midwest and other regions following the storms. Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., says natural gas spot prices spiked as high as 100 times typical levels, forcing utilities and other natural gas users to incur exorbitant costs, many of which were passed on to customers.
In a letter sent Saturday to federal regulators, Smith said the price spikes could “threaten the financial stability of some utilities that do not have sufficient cash reserves to cover their shortterm costs in this extraordinary event.”
In Winfield, Kansas, the city manager reported that a unit of natural gas that sold for about $3 earlier this month sold for more than $400 on Thursday. City Manager Taggart Wall told KWCH-TV in Wichita that Winfield, which budgets about $1.5 million a year for natural gas, expects to pay about $10 million for the past week alone.
Water woes added misery for people across the South who went without heat or electricity for days after the ice. Snow storms forced rolling blackouts from Minnesota to Texas.
Robert Tuskey was retrieving tools from the back of his pickup truck Saturday afternoon as he prepared to fix a water line at a friend’s home in Dallas.
“Everything’s been freezing,” Tuskey said. “I even had one in my own house … of course I’m lucky I’m a plumber.”
Tuskey, 49, said his plumbing business has had a stream of calls for help from friends and relatives with burst pipes. “I’m fixing to go help out another family member,” he said. “I know she ain’t got no money at all, but they ain’t got no water at all, and they’re older.”
As of Saturday, 1,445 public water systems in Texas had reported disrupted operations, said Toby Baker executive director of the state Commission on Environmental Quality. Government agencies were using mobile labs and coordinating to speed water testing.
That’s up from 1,300 reporting issues Friday afternoon, but Baker said the number of affected customers had dropped slightly. Most were under boil-water orders, with 156,000 lacking water service entirely.
“It seems like last night we may have seen some stabilization in the water systems across the state,” Baker said.
The Saturday thaw after 11 days of freezing temperatures in Oklahoma City left residents with burst water pipes, inoperable wells and furnaces knocked out of operation by brief power blackouts.