Ice storm’s impact lingers
Storm-weary residents wonder what’s next after latest calamity
Remnants of the record-setting ice storm that gripped the region began to melt Wednesday as Southeast Texas tallied the weather’s toll: as many as seven dead, hundreds of traffic accidents, two days of lost school for 1.1 million students, countless busted water pipes, and a deepening hole in Houston’s budget.
Now, after two days at a virtual standstill, many wonder what Mother Nature could possibly send the region’s way next.
“I’ve been trying to come out of the mud, the water, and now, the snow,” said Ore Price, a 32-yearold who lost his home to Hurricane Harvey and spent Wednesday at a local warming shelter.
Top city officials, however, were more optimistic: “Houston is still standing, and Houston is still strong,” Mayor Sylvester
Turner said at a Wednesday news conference. “Quite frankly, we’re getting stronger and stronger, but I would say to the good Lord, ‘We’re strong. You don’t have to keep testing us.’”
Among the unidentified victims of the storm were a homeless Houston man and an elderly woman with dementia who wandered outside of her Harris County home and into frigid temperatures not seen in decades.
Area schools, meanwhile, planned to welcome students back Thursday. Now, school officials must decide if they can make up the more than two weeks of classes that have been cancelled this year due to Harvey and now this week’s freeze.
But for many — the motorists stranded on stretches of interstate, or shivering Texans longing for warm weekend weather — the worst may well be over.
Storm deaths
Among the first known weather-related deaths was an unidentified homeless man found behind a dumpster on Telephone Road. Houston officials said Tuesday he likely died of hypothermia.
The cold also claimed the life of an unidentified elderly woman with dementia, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday afternoon.
Family members reported the 82-year-old missing Wednesday morning after discovering she wasn’t at her home in the 400 block of Dreamland in Crosby.
Investigators believe she wandered from her home into nearby woods, where she died in belowfreezing temperatures.
A mother and her two young children, meanwhile, died in a mobile home fire early Wednesday, the Harris County Fire Marshall’s Office said.
Natalie Tienda and her children Kiki and Tristen died in the home, which officials said was difficult to reach because of icy roads. David Tienda, their father, narrowly survived.
“He was trying to go in and get his family out,” said Capt. Dean Hensley. “He did everything he could, he just wasn’t able to get to them. The fire was just too intense.”
Authorities were still probing the cause of the fire Wednesday night, though Hensley noted there were space heaters inside.
Another man died Tuesday night on the Gulf Freeway, police said. The male driver left his vehicle and was walking along the freeway near Dixie Farm Road when a car went out of control and struck him, officials said.
In Montgomery County, Texas 105 was closed for several hours Tuesday after a fatal crash near Willis Waukegan Road. Officials said a pickup hit a patch of ice and spun into oncoming traffic, trapping the victim in his car.
Elsewhere in Texas, two people were found dead Wednesday morning in south Dallas, which like Houston saw some of its coldest temperatures in recent years.
Warming shelters
Ice, sleet and snow that lingered on area roads Wednesday morning also may have played a part in hundreds of non-fatal traffic accidents. Dozens of vehicles and trucks were stranded for hours along northbound U.S. 59 near the Fort Bend-Harris County line, a Texas Department of Transportation official said. Multiple 18-wheelers also jack-knifed on U.S. 59 at Hillcroft.
The low temperatures forced residents — many made homeless by Harvey — to again seek refuge at emergency shelters.
More than 160 people arrived Tuesday and Wednesday at South Main Baptist Church. Among them was Alexis Lewis-McMillian, 24, who said she normally stays with her husband in a tent in an encampment near Almeda Road and Cleburne Street.
By Tuesday, her sweat started to freeze, and the couple piled sleeping bags on top of their tent, to little effect.
“The tent, with that weather, didn’t protect us at all,” she said.
Then, Lewis-McMillian, who is more than seven months’ pregnant, had a seizure.
She arrived at the shelter in hospital scrubs, having stopped first at a hospital.
“If it’s too cold to go back to my tent, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said.
It was a fear James Barefield knew well. The leathery 54-yearold arrived in Houston just a few days before Harvey.
The storm destroyed his apartment. Then, four months later, cold drove him from his tent near the Midtown Sears.
“It’s been really hard to get back on my feet,” he said at the shelter. “It’s not a life. .. I gotta be somewhere I can be stable.”
Icy pipes
But a thaw has begun, with weekend temperatures expected to reach as high as 70, the National Weather Service said.
That’s welcome news to Sarah Gabbert, who like so many other Texans weathered the storm with frozen water pipes.
Around 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, the 37-year-old turned on the hot water in her bungalow in the Heights. One, single drip slowly fell, She said her plumber had instructed them to point a hair dryer — or pour hot water — on a certain point of the system. Her husband tried doing that, while she skipped showering and hoped water would be back to normal when she returned home from work.
‘Happy ending’
Jim Kanan, 60, and his wife, also Heights residents, went to help a friend try to fix her frozen pipes and found that they were cracked and broken. The friend had figured out how to use pool water to flush her toilet but needed help trying to shut the water off to her home before it started to spew everywhere.
As it happened, the friend was a professional hairdresser, with plenty of hair dryers. They aimed two at the frozen valve, while holding an umbrella over their heads; water was dripping from the roof as ice thawed. Eventually, the friend — scheduled to be heading out of town — was able to shut it off.
“So that’s the happy ending to that story,” Kanan said. “I’m sure that little adventure that we had today has probably been repeated many different places around Houston.”
Sun may be in the forecast but for Houston officials, the storm’s impact is far from over.
As Turner noted, “Houston is still standing.” But the looming overtime bill for city employees is going to hurt Houston’s treasury.
Turner said it’s unclear exactly how many extra hours were worked by police and firefighters.
“The wintry weather conditions were not 9-5,” he said. “And our police officers and firefighters and municipal workers were working around the clock, for like three days.”
“So if you just look at the cost of the first responders, I anticipate that I am going to see a pretty hefty tab.”
‘It wreaks havoc’
School officials, meanwhile, confronted an entirely different shortfall: a lack of time.
Classes are scheduled to resume Thursday for area schools and universities, most of which had ceased operations Tuesday and Wednesday.
Houston ISD Superintendent Richard Carranza said Wednesday that Texas’ largest school district would likely need to add two instructional days to its academic year after canceling classes for another two days this week.
“We’re going to try to avoid adding days onto the end of the year. It wreaks havoc on graduation schedules, and lots of students and families have announced dates and have people flying in,” Carranza said. “We’ll do everything in (our) power to avoid tacking onto the end of the school year.”
Cypress-Fairbanks ISD will use Feb. 19 as a make-up day, and spokespeople for Katy ISD and Sheldon ISD said officials will calculate whether they need to add more days to the academic calendar or minutes to school days once staff members are back in district offices Thursday.