Texas disaster declared.
State can tap Washington for aid; blame game for storm outages starts
Houston — President Joe Biden signed a major disaster declaration that will allow much of Texas to tap vast reserves of federal aid, the White House said Saturday, offering a new lifeline to a state struggling to recover from a brutal winter storm that left more than 50 dead and millions without power across the South.
As Texas thawed from days of frigid darkness, an epic blame game emerged over who is responsible for the billions of dollars in damages from what some expected would become the most costly weather disaster in state history.
Texas’s deregulated electrical grid had triggered mass outages that left residents in the nation’s second-largest state trapped without heat for days in freezing homes. Several died following desperate attempts to stay warm, including a 75-year-old woman and her three young grandchildren in a suburban Houston house fire sparked by a fireplace.
$600 daily power bills
Many other households faced jaw-dropping electrical bills from some of the state’s increasingly popular variable-rate plans, which charged thousands of dollars for a few days of power as wholesale energy prices soared.
The plans offer a potentially lower-cost alternative to traditional fixed-rate energy payments, but the outages quickly raised havoc. One company, Griddy, said it was forced to raise its prices to 300 times higher than the normal wholesale rate, meaning a typical $2-a-day household would face more than $600 in daily charges.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said Saturday he was convening an emergency meeting with state lawmakers to discuss the spikes, saying in a statement that “it is unacceptable for Texans who suffered through days in the freezing cold without electricity or heat to now be hit with skyrocketing energy costs.”
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s power grid, faces a state investigation and two lawsuits arguing that its failure to prepare for extreme cold left residents freezing and in the dark.
State to launch investigation
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Friday he was launching an investigation into how ERCOT and other power companies had “grossly mishandled” the winter storm. An ERCOT official defended its decision to trigger rolling outages, saying in a statement Saturday that it had been the “right choice to avoid a statewide blackout.”
The catastrophic winter storm was expected to become the “largest insurance claim event in (Texas’) history,” said the Insurance Council of Texas, a trade group, which estimated the damage would far outpace the $19 billion in claims from Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
Biden’s major disaster declaration in Texas, which followed similar state-of-emergency notices in Louisiana and Oklahoma, will allow the general public and business owners to apply for temporary-housing grants, home-repair loans and other emergency aid.
Biden’s Texas declaration offers individual assistance to 77 of 254 counties, including the areas around Houston, Dallas and Austin, but does not cover the entire state. Biden said Friday at the White House that he hopes to visit the state this week.
Abbott said Saturday that the “partial approval is an important first step,” and the White House said more counties could be covered as government officials continue assessing the damage. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has in recent days provided generators, food, water and other supplies statewide.
Power grid officials to face questions
The gatekeepers of the Texas power grid — famously unregulated and disconnected from the broader United States — are expected to face intense scrutiny over whether they neglected infrastructural upgrades and weather safeguards that could have helped during the disaster.
Congress is likely to open an investigation next week into what went wrong, and the Texas legislature is expected hold its own hearings. At least two Texas residents have filed lawsuits faulting ERCOT for not heeding safety warnings or boosting energy supplies.
Although temperatures have risen since the Arctic storm dropped air below freezing, many across the South are just beginning to recover from the devastation of burst pipes, power failures and flooded homes.
More than 14 million people across the South are still without a consistent supply of clean drinking water, and roughly 80,000 utility customers across Texas woke up Saturday morning without heat or power.