Here are some significant developments:
Biden’s declaration allows individuals and business owners in Texas to apply for federal emergency aid, including grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses and other recovery programs. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has already provided generators, drinking water, food and other supplies to Texas.
“This is great news for the people of Dallas after a horrible week,” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson (D) said Saturday. “The damage caused by this storm is extensive, and the disaster declaration will help our city recover.”
Around 80,000 electric utility customers in Texas remained in the dark and without heat Saturday morning as the state awoke to temperatures in the 20s. More than 14.3 million people in 190 counties were still experiencing water-service disruptions, and the impacts of the week’s Arctic cold blast stretched to Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and beyond.
As Texas began its recovery from the failure of its electric grid, attention began to shift to whether a disaster of this magnitude could have been avoided and who is to blame for the emergency. Congress is likely to open an investigation next week into what went wrong, and the state’s legislature is expected to conduct its own hearings.
Complaints are landing in court dockets, too. One lawsuit alleges the Electric Reliability Council of Texas ignored safety warnings for decades. Resident Donald McCarley claims in the suit that ERCOT failed to prepare for inclement weather and produce enough energy, the Dallas Morning News reported.
At least one other lawsuit has been filed related to the power outages, court records show.
ERCOT defended its decision to enact rolling outages throughout the week.
“Our thoughts are with all Texans who have and are suffering due to this past week,” a spokesperson for ERCOT said Saturday in a statement. “However, because approximately 46% of privately-owned generation tripped offline this past Monday morning, we are confident that our grid operators made the right choice to avoid a statewide blackout.”
Independent authorities said it is up to the Public Utility Commission of Texas — which oversees ERCOT — to mandate that suppliers better prepare for extreme cold and penalize those that choose not to do so. Without such costs, experts said, the power suppliers will continue to neglect preparations, with predictable consequences.
“To save millions of dollars, the generators failed to weatherize, and the consequences are that people have died and it’s cost the state many billions of dollars in repairs to our homes and our buildings,” said Tom “Smitty” Smith, a former longtime director of the Texas branch of the left-leaning public-interest organization Public Citizen.
The bout of winter weather could cost $18 billion in insured losses, with the total economic damage likely to be higher, according to Karen Clark, co-founder and chief executive of Karen Clark and Co., a catastrophe modeling firm. The damage was spread across 20 states, though most was in Texas.
The Insurance Council of Texas said the storm would be the “largest insurance claim event in [Texas] history.”
Meanwhile, the week’s icy weather continued its toll.
A 75-year-old woman and her three young grandchildren died in a weather-related house fire in Sugar Land, Tex., early Tuesday while trying to keep warm, officials said. Loan Le, 75, and grandchildren Olivia, 11; Edison, 8; and Colette, 5 succumbed to the blaze.
The family had been using a fireplace to keep warm as the household faced at least eight hours without power, said Douglas Adolph, a spokesman for the Houston suburb.
The children’s mother, Jackie Pham Nguyen, and her friend were outside around 2 a.m. when firefighters arrived to find the home engulfed in flames. Nguyen had to be “physically restrained from running back inside” to save her family, Adolph said.
Adolph described the home as a “total loss,” and said the cause remains under investigation.
Public schools in several of Texas’s major cities — including Houston, Dallas and Austin — will remain closed through Tuesday, as staff members and parents seek to get back on their feet. Some schools have served as warming centers throughout the week.
Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, remained under a boil-water advisory Saturday. Much of Austin, Texas’s capital, lacked running water, and officials could not say when it might return.
Water distribution events were planned in major Texas metro areas. Austin Mayor Steve Adler (D) asked the federal government to supply more bottles as truckloads arrive from other states.
“This has just been one thing after another,” Adler told CNN on Friday. “This is a community of people that are scared, and upset, and angry. We’re eventually going to need some better answers to why we’re here.”
Morning temperatures in southern Texas plunged again into the 20s, but the state’s weather was on the upswing. Highs on Saturday were forecast to reach the 60s and 70s, with overnight lows above freezing in the 30s and 40s.
But with the warming weather came a new strain on infrastructure. Rapid temperature swings can cause water pipes to burst, ice to slide dangerously off buildings and roadways to crack.
A fire broke out late Friday at a Hilton Garden Inn in Killeen, 70 miles north of Austin, after the building’s sprinkler system failed. The hotel was at full capacity, with all 102 rooms occupied, local news outlets reported.
Some guests were reportedly transported to a nearby church to recover. No deaths were reported as of Saturday morning, and officials have not identified a cause of the fire.
Officials expected that the extent of the week’s damage would not become clear until communities had fully thawed. Adler told CNN that people were likely to continue reporting ruptured pipes over the weekend as temperatures warm, revealing more suffering.
“I’m pretty sure that we don’t know the extent at this point,” he said.
Emily Wax-Thibodeaux, Mark Berman, Griff Witte, Fenit Nirappil, Amy Goldstein and Derek Hawkins contributed to this report.