San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
BIDEN DECLARES MAJOR DISASTER
Frozen pipes, electric woes remain as cold snap eases its grip
The president on Saturday issued a major disaster declaration for Texas as the focus shifts to who is responsible for the winter weather crisis that killed more than 50 and left millions without power and water.
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, a 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.
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.”
Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith called Saturday for federal investigations into possible price gouging of natural gas following the storms. Smith said natural gas spot prices spiked as high as 100 times typical levels.
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.
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.”
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.
In Houston, residents on Saturday were still being told to boil all water. In Austin, the state capital, many homes still lacked running water, and officials couldn’t say when it might return.
In Jackson, Miss., most of the city of about 161,000 lacked running water, and officials blamed city water mains that are more than 100 years old and not built for freezing weather.
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