Dramatic images of the polar wave hitting Texas and the rest of the United States

Meanwhile, a severe frost warning is in effect in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, with freezing temperatures.

According to national meteorologists, the frost is expected to lift in the afternoon and evening, when temperatures slowly start to rise over the weekend.

Waiting for this dawn approximately 200,000 homes in Texas have recovered electricity, after cuts suffered by heavy snowfall in recent days in large parts of the countrylocal sources reported.

Yet millions of people do not have clean drinking water at home, and residents searching for food or bottled water have reported finding themselves in stores with empty shelves and long lines.

When firefighters reached a blaze at an apartment building in the San Antonio area on Thursday, their efforts were hampered by frozen fire hydrants.

The intense cold of the past few days has caused many homes to freeze and main and residential water pipes to rupture, creating chaos for the facility, said Toby Baker, executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

The state is working with the federal government to integrate mobile labs to help solve the problem.

“I called Governor Greg Abbott tonight to discuss the current situation in Texas and identify ways to support the state’s recovery from this storm,” President Joe Biden said on his Twitter account. “I made it clear to the governor that I will work tirelessly to ensure that his state has what it needs,” he added.

This meteorological contingency has left in its wake the death of at least 26 people, which included 3 deaths in carbon monoxide incidents, as well as a driver who collided with a snow plow.

It was learned that at least 20 cities suffered the coldest temperatures in their history on Tuesday, February 16.

According to the National Weather Service (NWS for its acronym in English), last week, some two thousand records for low temperatures had already been broken.

It has also been reported that Texas was “within seconds or minutes” of a catastrophic power outage that could have left millions of people without power for months, due to extreme and unusual winter weather.This was revealed by officials from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the power grid that covers most of the state.

ERCOT chairman Bill Magness explained that the continued blackout decision kept the whole system from collapsing: if operators had not acted immediately, “month-long” outages could have go off and leave Texas in crisis “indefinitely. Long”.

“We were seconds or minutes away from a possible blackout,” he said, stressing that operators needed to act quickly to reduce the amount of power delivered.