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AUSTIN, Texas (CBSDFW.COM/AP) – A frigid blast of winter weather across the United States plunged Texas into an unusually icy emergency on Monday, February 15, which cut power to more than 2 million people and closed grocery stores and dangerously snow-covered roads.
The slow thaw and more icy troughs to come also took a toll on the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in Texas.
RELATED: More than 1,600 flights canceled outside Texas airports
Worsening conditions have halted delivery of COVID-19 vaccine shipments and left some Texas suppliers scrambling to find takers for doses expiring within hours.
State health officials said Texas, which was due to receive more than 400,000 additional doses of the vaccine this week, no longer expected deliveries to take place until at least Wednesday.
But with doses already on hand expiring, Rice University suddenly began offering vaccines at its closed Houston campus.
Harris Health System told the school it had about 1,000 vaccines that were “going to be wasted” and asked if the school could find takers, said Doug Miller, a spokesperson for the university.
“The window only lasted a few hours. They need to deal with it quickly, ”Miller said.
Temperatures plunged into the single digits as far south as San Antonio, and homes that had already been without power for hours had no certainty as to when the lights and heat would come back on, so that the state’s overloaded power grid boiled down to rotating power cuts typically seen only in summers of 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius).
RELATED: Thousands of Fort Worth residents under boil water advisories due to plant power loss
The storm was part of a massive system that brought snow, sleet and freezing rain to the southern plains and spread through the Ohio Valley and into the northeast. The Southwest Power Pool, a group of utilities in 14 states, called for rolling outages because the reserve power supply was depleted. Some utilities have said they are starting outages, while others have urged customers to reduce their energy use.
“We’re living a really historic event right now,” said Jason Furtado, professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, pointing all of Texas under a winter storm warning and the extent of freezing temperatures.
In Houston, where county leaders had warned the freeze could create problems the size of the massive hurricanes hitting the Gulf Coast, an electricity supplier said power may not be restored in some houses before Tuesday.
“This meteorological event is truly unprecedented. We all live here know it, ”said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. He defended the preparations made by the network operators and called the system’s request a record.
“This event went well beyond the design parameters for a typical, if not extreme, Texan winter that you would normally expect. And that is really the result that we are seeing, ”said Woodfin.
President Joe Biden also declared an emergency in Texas in a statement Sunday night. The declaration aims to add federal support to state and local government response efforts.
AFTER: North Texas man living in his car due to hours without electricity
(© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All rights reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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