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Jake and his wife Rachel live outside of Dallas with a seven-month-old baby. She has spent the last few days chopping wood in the forest so she can build a fire in the house fireplace, which they have never had to use before.
– If we didn’t have our stove, I’m afraid our baby would have died of cold, he tells DN.
At least 37 people has died since an unexpected snowstorm paralyzed Texas and much of the southern United States. More than five million people in Texas have been without power for several days.
In Abilene, central Texas, an elderly man was found dead and frozen in his wheelchair Thursday.
According to the NPR radio channel, a single hospital in Houston has received more than 100 emergency cases of smoke and lung injuries after families fired inside to keep warm. Half of the patients were children.
Frozen people in Houston had to queue for hours to fill their gas tanks.
Photo: David J. Phillip / AP
The crisis runs the risk of a cascade effect of related disasters. Texans are not used to freezing temperatures, most residential buildings are not insulated, and many lack winter clothing. Cities have no infrastructure for snow removal, plows or road salt, and many roads have become life threatening due to the freezing cold.
Millions of residents have had hot water for several days to prevent water pipes from freezing and bursting, leading to a severe water shortage. Grocery stores were forced to close when they ran out of power. Many families with children have temporarily moved in with friends and relatives who have electricity and heat, risking a further increase in corona infections in the state (41,000 have died in Texas from the pandemic so far). The condition of those who are already sick also runs the risk of being aggravated by the cold inside.
300 thermal tents have been set up in Texas cities, where residents can gather to escape the cold, which also runs the risk of exacerbating the pandemic.
A family has sought refuge in a furniture store that has been turned into a temporary shelter in Houston, Texas.
Photo: David J. Phillip
Many desperate families have tried to find rooms in fully booked hotels.
– I was with Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Harvey but this is without a doubt the worst I have ever seen. I had to deny a mother with a baby. They had no electricity or water. “I had to walk away and cry afterward,” an employee at the Hilton Hotel in Austin told the New York Times.
The lone star The Texas state flag has always been associated with independence.
Texas likes to see itself as a state where residents perform better for themselves.
The state government often distances itself symbolically from the federal government. Every time a Democrat becomes president, it is customary for Republicans in Texas to draft a bill to formally leave the United States and become an independent nation, something that is never completed, but the threat is always up in the air.
Now it is precisely the independent status of Texas that is being criticized for having caused the historic energy crisis in the state.
Electrician trying to fix a power outage in Odessa, Texas.
Photo: Eli Hartman / AP
There are three integrals power grids in the United States: one for the western half of the country, one for the east, and then a separate system for Texas. It was this system that collapsed this week.
The crisis has shown how politically charged energy issues are in a state that has long been the heart of the American oil industry.
Republicans who control Texas have tried to blame the collapse of the entire energy system on the transition to renewable energy advocated by Democrats in the state.
Gov. Greg Abbott said in an interview with conservative Fox News that the main reason for the crisis was that wind turbines stopped working in the cold.
“This shows that the green transition would be deadly for the entire United States,” Abbott said.
The cold in Texas has raised strong feelings about energy use in the United States.
Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty / AFP
But an analysis of the Texas energy supply instead of Princeton University shows that more than 90 percent of the state’s energy comes from coal and natural gas. Wind and solar energy represent a very small part of the state’s energy resources. In principle, all the reduction in energy production that caused the power outages is explained by the fact that natural gas power plants froze and could no longer supply power.
The collapse of the system came despite persistent warnings from energy experts and local state politicians.
Energy experts have been He tried to persuade the Texas state government to implement improvements to the power grid, so that it is better prepared for unexpected weather changes in general and cold in particular. But the warnings have been ignored, according to energy experts.
In the rest of the United States and Canada, power grids generally have a 15 percent reserve for unexpected surges. But according to energy researcher Robert McCullough’s power system, Texas has refused to create a similar buffer.
“So this was not a coincidence,” McCullough told the New York Times.
Refrigerators are empty at a grocery store in Austin after winter cold caused massive power outages across the state of Texas.
Photo: Sandy Carson / TT
After extensive power outages during an unusually cold winter in 2011, local politician Sylvester Turner, now Houston’s mayor, warned that Texas power systems need major improvements to cope with climate change. Turner wrote a bill aimed at creating a power reserve for cold winters only, but Republicans in the state government ignored the proposal.
Democrat Beto O’Rourke, from El Paso, Texas, said Republicans who control the state spent all their time on other issues, such as expelling immigrants and banning transgender people from public restrooms, while the state’s power system collapsed.
– North America’s power producing capital cannot produce enough power to keep its own people warm during a snow storm. The state government cannot say that this was surprising. Energy experts and Democrats have been warning precisely about this for many years. But Greg Abbott chose to ignore the facts, the science and the tough decisions, and now all of Texas has to pay the price for this once again, O’Rourke said in a television interview Thursday.
Senator Ted Cruz has received massive criticism for a vacation trip he made to Cancun, Mexico.
Photo: MEGA
Senator Ted Cruz received harsh criticism for flying on vacation to Cancun, Mexico, amid the current crisis. Cruz defended the decision by demanding that his two daughters, aged 10 and 12, accompany him on vacation. After the criticism, Cruz rebooked the return trip and returned to Texas Thursday night.
Other Republicans in the state he has tried to stick to his Texas self-image. Rick Perry, a former Texas governor, said state residents would rather fight such a crisis than “let the federal government get involved.”
In the end, Texas had to ask the federal government for help. Joe Biden has declared a state of emergency in Texas, which means that the state receives federal emergency aid. The Fema crisis authority has been summoned to provide residents with generators, blankets and drinking water.
