The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Southern cities hit hard by storms face new crisis: No water
Southern cities slammed by winter storms that l eft millions without power for days have traded one crisis for another: Busted water pipes ruptured by record-low temperatures created shortages of clean drinking water, shut down the Memphis airport on Friday and left hospitals struggling to maintain sanitary conditions.
In Texas, 7 million people — a quarter of the population of the nation’s second-largest state — were under orders to boil tap water before drinking it because low water pressure could have allowed bacteria to seep into the system. A man died at in 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 passenger 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.
He said the city’s water mains are more than 100 years old and not built to handle the freezing weather that hit the city as multiple storms dumped record amounts of snow across the South.
“We are dealing with an extreme challenge with getting more water through our distribution system,” said Lumumba.
The city was providing water for flushing toilets and drinking, but residents had to pick it up, leaving the elderly and those living on icy roads vulnerable.
The water woes were the latest misery for residents left without heat or electricity for days after the ice and snow storms earlier in the week, forcing rolling blackouts from Minnesota to Texas.
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 4 million customers. Smaller outages remained, but Bill Magness, president of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said the grid now can provide power throughout the entire system.
The storms also left more than 330,000 from Virginia to Louisiana without power. About 70,000 in Oregon on Friday were still enduring a weeklong outage following a massive ice and snow storm. Oregon’s governor ordered the National Guard to go door-to-door in the hardest-hit areas to ensure residents have enough food and water.
The extreme weather was blamed for the deaths of at least 70 people, including people struggling to get warm and a Tennessee farmer who tried to save two calves that apparently wandered onto a frozen pond.
Federal Emergency Management Agency acting administrator Bob Fenton said teams in Texas were distributing fuel, water, blankets and other supplies.
“What has me most worried is making sure that people stay warm,” Fenton said on “CBS This Morning.”
Houston residents probably will have to boil tap water in the fourth-largest U.S. city until Sunday or Monday, said Mayor Sylvester Turner.
Bulk and bottled water deliveries were planned Friday to the hardest-hit Louisiana areas with a focus on hospitals, nursing homes and dialysis centers, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said, adding that he was hopeful that warmer weather expected during the weekend would speed up repairs.