Power lines in Houston on Tuesday, when millions of Texans faced power failures. There is research suggesting that Arctic warming is weakening the jet stream, the high-level air current that circles the northern latitudes and usually holds back the frigid polar vortex. The brutal cold in the middle of the country seemed to defy a trend of ever-milder winters, but the frigid temperatures in Texas could be a consequence of global warming. The storm also severely disrupted the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine, forcing vaccination sites to close across the South and hampering the shipments of doses. Some customers lost water altogether, forced to flush their toilets with melting snow.īy early Tuesday afternoon, Southwest Power Pool, which manages the electrical grid across 17 Central and Western states, had stopped ordering controlled rolling cutoffs of power service to customers as the energy supply began meeting the extreme demand, a spokesman said. The disruptions caused problems at water treatment plants, leading to boil water advisories for hundreds of thousands of people across Texas, from Fort Worth down to the Rio Grande Valley.

Maps show where frigid temperatures led to power outages, many in places unaccustomed to such severe cold.

Greg Abbott, expressed sharp criticism of the operation of the state’s power grid, and the Texas House speaker announced a legislative hearing looking into the widespread power failures. More than 3.5 million of those outages were in Texas, where many people had been without power for hours or even days in freezing temperatures. And almost four million customers across the country remained without electricity on Tuesday evening, according to, which aggregates live power data from utilities. Temperatures across the middle of the country had plummeted to lows not felt in a century or more, with measurements of minus 14 in Oklahoma City and minus 20 in Fayetteville, Ark., even as a new winter storm was building in the southern Plains.Īt least 23 people have died since winter weather began wreaking havoc last week, some from the cold itself and some from attempts to escape it. Millions of people remained without power on Tuesday and were anticipating another cold, dark night in the wake of a deadly winter storm that bulldozed its way across the southern and central parts of the United States this week, in places where such perilously frigid conditions tend to arrive just once in a generation.īy late afternoon Tuesday, the storm was moving into eastern Canada, but the damage left behind was severe. After a deadly winter storm made its way across parts of the United States this week, millions of Texans remained without power in freezing temperatures on Wednesday.

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