Texas faces thirsty work:
Most have power again, but water crisis emerges
Winter storm moves off, leaving power outages, ravaged water systems.
The winter storm that brought more misery to the South on Thursday continued to dump snow and ice across the Mid-atlantic and Northeast on Friday, just as millions of Texans grappled with the aftermath of the deadly winter blast.
Although power outages numbered about 180,000 in Texas on Friday – down from the 4 million earlier in the week – the crisis was not over due to the lack of safe drinking water in many areas.
The storms and frigid weather also left over 140,000 without power in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia early Friday. More than 101,000 were without electricity in Mississippi, according to poweroutage.us. In Oregon, 70,000 were still enduring a weeklong outage after a massive ice and snow storm.
The extreme weather was blamed for the deaths of at least 58 people, with a growing toll of those who perished trying to keep warm.
In the northeastern U.S., winter weather advisories stretched from Eastern Kentucky to Massachusetts by Friday morning with a handful of winter storm warnings splattered across North Carolina into Maryland, Accuweather said. Over 40 million people live where the advisories or warnings were in effect.
The storm was forecast to bring 1-3 inches of snow to the Northeast on Friday, the National Weather Service said, while places downwind of the Lower Great Lakes could have received 4 to 8 inches.
Another snowstorm will affect portions of the Midwest, Great Lakes and interior Northeast on Sunday and Monday, Accuweather said.
“Compared to the wintry precipitation this past week, snow amounts are expected to be lower and there is little threat of ice,” Accuweather meteorologist Ryan Adamson said. “Furthermore, areas in the South that dealt with winter’s wrath the past several days will be spared this time.”
Utilities from Minnesota to Texas used rolling blackouts to ease strained power grids. But the remaining Texas outages were mostly weather-related, according to the state’s grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott warned that state residents “are not out of the woods,” with temperatures still well below freezing statewide and disruptions in food supply chains.
Adding to the state’s misery, the weather jeopardized drinking water systems. Authorities ordered 7 million people – a quarter of the population of the nation’s second-largest state – to boil tap water before drinking it, after record-low temperatures damaged infrastructure and pipes.
President Joe Biden said he called Abbott on Thursday and offered additional support from the federal government to state and local agencies. Biden said he plans to visit Texas next week but will only go if he determines he won’t be a “burden.”
Contributing: The Associated Press