Biden signed a major disaster declaration that will allow much of Texas to tap vast reserves of federal aid, the White House said Saturday, offering a new financial lifeline to the state.
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), who thanked Biden for granting the disaster declaration, suggested that federal assistance would be used to help those facing spiking power bills.
“The current plan is with the federal assistance to be able to help homeowners both with repair — we have a lot of water leaks, water damage, pipes bursting — but also with their electricity bills,” McCaul said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
He said the federal assistance is “what Texas needs right now so desperately. A lot of people are hurting right now.”
Texas’s deregulated electrical grid triggered mass outages that left residents in the nation’s second-largest state trapped without heat for days in freezing homes.
Several died after desperate attempts to stay warm, including a 75-year-old woman and her three young grandchildren in a suburban Houston house fire sparked by a fireplace.
Some Texans on variable-rate electricity plans, which offer a potentially lower-cost alternative to traditional fixed-rate energy payments, had service through the storm. But the bills skyrocketed. One company, Griddy, said it was forced to raise its prices as much as 300 times the normal wholesale rate, meaning a typical $2-a-day household would face more than $600 in daily charges.
Griddy knew that the storm was going to cause a massive spike in prices, and it sent an email to its customers on Sunday night warning them to find new providers. But when customers went shopping, the other providers weren’t offering plans.
One resident, Ty Williams, told WFAA that he saw the email from Griddy and tried to switch to a new company but that no one would accept him as a new customer until Feb. 26. Williams told the outlet that he normally pays $660 a month across three electric meters — home, guesthouse and office — but that his bill shot to more than $17,000 the past week.
“How in the world can anyone pay that?” Williams told WFAA. “I mean you go from a couple hundred dollars a month … there’s absolutely no way … it makes no sense.”
Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said Saturday that he was convening an emergency meeting with state lawmakers to discuss the spikes, saying in a statement that “it is unacceptable for Texans who suffered through days in the freezing cold without electricity or heat to now be hit with skyrocketing energy costs.”
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s power grid, also faces a state investigation and two lawsuits arguing that its failure to prepare for extreme cold left residents freezing and in the dark.
The catastrophic winter storm was expected to become the “largest insurance claim event in [Texas] history,” said the Insurance Council of Texas, a trade group, which estimated that the damage would far outpace the $19 billion in claims from Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
The White House’s disaster declaration followed similar state-of-emergency notices in Louisiana and Oklahoma, which will allow the general public and business owners to apply for temporary-housing grants, home-repair loans and other emergency aid.
It offers individual assistance to 77 of 254 counties, including the areas around Houston, Dallas and Austin, but does not cover the entire state.
Abbott said Saturday that the White House’s “partial approval is an important first step,” and the White House said more counties could be covered as government officials continue assessing the damage. In recent days, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has provided generators, food, water and other supplies statewide.
Asked about the partial declaration on ABC News’s “This Week,” press secretary Jen Psaki said Sunday that the White house has been in “very close touch with Governor Abbott.”
“What happens here is the governor requested a federal disaster declaration. The president asked his team to expedite that. And FEMA determined where the counties should be — where it should focus the immediate resources, where the counties that are hardest-hit, so that they can make sure they get to the people in most need,” she said.
As some Texas lawmakers have called for Biden to visit the state — and the president himself said he hopes to visit soon — Psaki said he could visit Texas “as soon as this week.”
Psaki reiterated on “This Week” that he does not want to be a burden as the state struggles to recover from the storm.
“He is eager to go down to Texas and show his support,” she said. “But he’s also very mindful of the fact that it’s not a light footprint for a president to travel to a disaster area. He does not want to take away resources or attention. And we’re going to do that at an appropriate time in coordination with people on the ground.
Marisa Iati and Drew Harwell contributed to this report.