Millions are still without power as winter storms continue

Millions of people are without power in Texas after some of the coldest weather experienced in decades tripped many of the state's power plants offline. That prompted rolling blackouts that at its peak affected more than 4.3 million homes and businesses. Officials are warning the power may continue to remain offline for days to come. 

Tricia Lancaster, a Dallas resident who currently does have power, told CNN, "It's like waiting for a bomb to drop. Like I have power, but I'm waiting for it to go off."

She described how her mother and daughter lost power, but hers remained on. She brought all her family to her house but that has presented challenges of its own.

"We knew for a week that this was coming... Why weren't we ready?" she added.

Watch the full interview below:

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper announced that he will issue an executive order today, in advance of inclement weather, declaring a state of emergency in the state, according to a statement released today.

The statement said that transportation workers have started brining major highways, bridges and overpasses in parts of the state. 

"As of 11 a.m., crews had placed nearly 30,000 gallons of brine on roads in the Triangle, Piedmont Triad, Charlotte area and mountains," the statement said.

Cooper's statement also says he has authorized the activation of 40 National Guard personnel to "support fallen tree and debris removal."

The mayor of Waco, Texas, is urging residents to slow down their usage of water for the next 48 hours, but also telling them not to believe texted rumors that the water system would be shut down.

“This made the situation worse because people began to hoard unusual amounts of water,” Mayor Dillon Meek said in a video statement published to the city’s social media account.

Meek says their system also has been hampered by the temporary loss of power to one of their two water treatment plants, with “major systems malfunctioning” at the other. Additionally, demand in one region of the city suddenly increased by 500% Tuesday, which Meek says is due in part to concern about the false rumor that water would be cut off.

“Our water system needs time to recharge, and our team still considers the system to be stressed,” said Meek.

The city is asking people to avoid large loads of laundry or dishwashing. Meeks says if capacity again goes down dramatically at their treatment plants, they may have to issue boil water notices, which he acknowledges would be a major burden for people who don’t have power.

As the nation continues to deal with the impacts of extreme winter weather, many states across the United States have been forced to delay Covid-19 vaccinations.

Here is how some states are responding to the weather:

As some conservatives blame the environmental movement and frozen wind turbines for the power outage disaster in Texas, it's a cold reminder that the path to clean American energy is blocked more by ideology than technology. 

Since wind accounts for a tenth of the Lone Star state's winter power and the Permian Basin leaks and flares enough natural gas to heat two million homes a year, it's a bit like blaming your car battery for a stalled engine when you've run out of gas. 

While properly engineered turbines have been proven to work from Alaska to Antarctica, many in Texas did freeze up. But so did pipelines, diesel engines and even the reactor at one of the state's two nuclear power plants. 

In typical "Don't Mess with Texas" fashion, the state has its own power grid on purpose, which is a major impediment to creating a national "smart grid," in which a sunny day in Arizona could power primetime in Boston and vice versa.

And like California, there is no financial incentive for power companies to fortify their equipment. It's a Wild West free market, where the wholesale price of electricity went from $22 a megawatt-hour to more than $8,000 when demand spiked — a swing so extreme, some power companies were encouraging customers to sign up with someone else. 

Meanwhile El Paso, a city outside the western boundaries of the Texas grid, not only has a lifeline to the Western US grid, it also had the sense to winterize its power plants after a deep freeze in 2011. They experienced minimal outages this time, only lasting minutes for a few thousand, despite seeing similar temps and weather to the rest of the state.  

Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), said they hope to get to the point where they can rotate outages that don’t last longer than an hour at a time.

“The best case at this point is that today or tomorrow we're able to at least get back down to the point where all the consumers are experiencing outages that are no longer than, say, 30 minutes to an hour at a time. So we're actually rotating through people and so they're able to be turned back on for a while, and then another area is turned off and they're turned back on. And I think that's the best case,” Woodfin said.

“I don't think it's likely that we're going to have enough available based on our forecasts and the information that we're getting in from the generators that we're gonna have everybody back on today, or before at least the morning peak tomorrow," he added.

ERCOT CEO Bill Magness said the answer really depends on the availability of those generators. 

“We're working with them around the clock. Some of them are facing constraints in getting their generating units back online but they are all working towards that. And if they all come on very quickly, we can restore load very quickly,” Magness said.

Officials didn’t give an estimate on when full restoration could occur. 

McMurry University in Abilene, Texas, is allowing campus residents to use water from the campus swimming pool to flush their toilets as the city continues to struggle with water problems during the winter storm.

The university posted a statement on Facebook:

The City of Abilene, which has been battling to restore power to their water plants for days, tweeted some good news in the last hour.  

“Power restored to all of Abilene's water plants,  goal of water service to entire city by end of the day,” according to the post. 

All of Wednesday’s remaining flights at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport in Texas have been canceled or diverted as the region continues to struggle with water supply issues following the winter storm.

In a pair of tweets, airport officials say they are working to restore the water supply to the entire airport, even in a limited capacity, Wednesday afternoon.

“For now, all flights have been canceled or diverted for the remainder of the day,” Houston Hobby’s tweets say. “Our team is manually providing non-consumable water to airport restrooms from portable water storage tanks.”

Entergy, a power company for Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, says that about 40,000 of its customers in Louisiana are still without power as a result of the winter storms that swept the area, according to a statement.

The outages are "primarily in the hardest hit areas of Greater Baton Rouge, Livingston and Tangipahoa parishes," the company said.

Entergy also encouraged their customers in northern Louisiana "to monitor another system of snow and ice that is forecast to impact our state throughout the day today and into Thursday."

On Monday, Entergy reported that 24,600 of its customers were without power in the state.