Major new winter storm forecast to sweep across Texas, adding to state’s woes

Texas has been hot hard by a snowstorm 

Credit: Yffy Yossifor/Star-Telegram via AP

A major new winter storm was forecast to sweep across Texas on Thursday as hundreds of thousands remained without power from this week’s first freezing blast that paralysed the state and left dozens dead.

Officials warned Texans not to expect respite from sub-zero temperatures until at least Saturday, with the National Weather Service predicting tornadoes, bitter cold and more heavy snow from the fresh storm.

Residents who have been without water, power or heat for days faced further delays to the restoration of their supplies, and the coronavirus vaccination programme was largely put on hold.

President Joe Biden, who has approved an emergency declaration for Texas and promised federal aid, called off a trip to a vaccine production plant in Michigan on Thursday.

“We started out with Covid, which is obviously as much of a challenge as anybody should face, and on top of that it’s 18 degrees below zero for almost the entire state,” Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, Texas, told CNN.

“Add power outages, and now we’re adding on water issues, it is too much to ask of anybody. People are angry and confused and frustrated.”

Several hospitals in Texas were evacuating patients to other facilities after losing power and running water. 

“Our hospitals is where the most vulnerable are impacted by this and the focus is to get them online as quickly and effectively as possible,” Mark Sloan, emergency management coordinator for Harris County, said at a briefing.

“We are working with the state to bring in additional water. We have found additional resources for them when we can. We are all in this together.”

The death from a storm that covered almost three-quarters of the continental United States in snow reached at least 38 nationwide by Thursday morning, the New York Times reported, with more than 100 million people from Texas to Massachusetts under winter storm warnings or advisories.

More than five million lost power during the peak of the original storm, with 500,000 Texans still without it on Thursday. Rolling blackouts persisted in areas where power had been at least partially restored.

The winter storms also sparked a political controversy, with Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, attempting to blame frozen wind turbines for the power outages.

But the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid, said wind accounted for only 13 per cent of power outages in recent days and failures in natural gas, coal and nuclear energy were more to blame.