The deaths of 58 people in at least a dozen states are being blamed on this week's pair of back-to-back winter storms and frigid cold that left millions of people without heat or clean drinking water.
The victims succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning, falling through ice, car crashes, a tornado, a house fire, slips and falls and just plain cold.
At least three people in the Houston area died of hypothermia inside their homes, the Houston Chronicle reported, citing the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences. A man in Abilene was also found dead inside his freezing home, according to the Associated Press.
A barefoot man was found dead early Thursday in a parking lot in the Houston area, the Houston Chronicle also said. He was wearing a jacket, but no shirt underneath it. The wind chill dropped to 19 degrees that morning.
They are among the more than two dozen deaths believed to be connected to the weather in Texas.
"This weather is not just cold, it’s deadly," said Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez.
In all, at least 58 people died nationwide because of the weather this week, the AP reported.
Other numbers as the pair of winter storms, named Uri and Viola by The Weather Channel, trekked across the U.S. from west to east, are also staggering.
Fourteen million people without clean drinking water in Texas alone.
Five million power outages in one day.
At least 6,600 daily cold records tied or broken between Feb. 7 and 16, according to NOAA's Weather Prediction Center.
And five tornadoes.
Federal emergencies were declared in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, which paves the way for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to supply equipment and other resources.
More than 5.6 million homes and businesses were without power at the height of the outages on Monday morning, according to poweroutage.us. The bulk of those - 4.3 million - were in Texas. Millions of people remained without power over the next several days as freezing temperatures and increased demand resulted in rolling blackouts.
The huge number prompted calls for investigations and hearings into how that many outages could have happened.
By Friday morning, the number of outages in Texas had dropped to about 195,000. Officials said most of the remaining outages were due to ice and other weather impacts, rather than intentional blackouts.
Officials warned that rotating outages could return if electricity demand rises in the coming days.
Including Texas, more than 535,000 homes and businesses in seven states were still without power as of about 11:45 a.m. Friday, according to poweroutage.us.
Besides Texas, the states with the most current outages are Mississippi with more than 100,000; Louisiana with about 75,000; Oregon with 70,000; Kentucky with 55,000; West Virginia with about 51,000; and Virginia with 37,500.
In some areas, power was restored after snow and ice earlier in the week, only to be knocked out again.
The weather also led to hazardous driving conditions across large parts of the U.S. and caused the delay of COVID-19 deliveries. Vaccination sites and testing locations were shut down in several states.
Blog: weather.com/news/news/2021-02...
17 фев 2021
