Texans endure storm with no power, heat

>> Thousands of frustrated Texans shivered in homes without power for a second day Thursday, most of them around booming Austin, and fading hopes of a quick fix stirred grim memories of a deadly 2021 blackout after an icy winter storm across the southern U.S.

The freeze has been blamed for at least 10 traffic deaths on slick roads this week in Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. And even as Texas finally began thawing Thursday, a new Artic front from Canada was headed toward the northern U.S. and threatening New England with potentially the coldest weather in decades. Wind chills could dive below minus 50.

In Austin, city officials compared the damage from fallen trees and iced-over power lines to tornadoes as they came under mounting criticism for slow repairs and shifting timelines to restore power.

“We had hoped to make more progress today,” said Jackie Sargent, general manager of Austin Energy. “And that simply has not happened.”

Across Texas, more than 360,000 customers lacked power Thursday, according to PowerOutage.us. The failures were most widespread in Austin, where impatience was rising among 150,000 customers nearly two days after the electricity first went out, which for many also means no heat. Power failures have affected about 30% of customers in the city of nearly a million at any given time since Wednesday.

By Thursday night, Austin officials backtracked on early estimates that power would be fully restored by Friday evening, saying the extent of the damage was worse than originally calculated and that they could no longer predict when all the lights may come back on.

Allison Rizzolo, who lost power in Austin, told KEYETV that she wished there were more clarity from the city on what to do or expect.

“I get that there’s a fine line between preparedness and panic, but I wish they’d been more aggressive in their communications,” Rizzolo said.

For many Texans, it was the second time in three years that a February freeze — temperatures were in the 30s Thursday with wind chills below freezing — caused prolonged outages.

Unlike the 2021 blackouts in Texas, when hundreds of people died after the state’s grid was pushed to the brink of total failure because of a lack of generation, the outages in Austin this time were largely the result of frozen equipment and ice-burdened trees and limbs falling on power lines.