Photo: Collected –
Metropolis Desk-
According to Skynews, the US winter storm has claimed 32 lives and left 3.4 million without electricity and battling to remain warm. On Thursday, it is anticipated that the most recent storm front will travel from areas of Texas, Arkansas, and the Lower Mississippi Valley to the Northeast.
Bob Oravec, the National Weather Service’s primary forecaster, stated that there has been “really no letup” in some of the suffering felt by residents of that region. According to the weather service, more than 100 million people reside in areas under winter weather warnings, watches, or advisories.
According to scientists, the polar vortex, a weather pattern typically found in the Arctic, is expanding into lower latitudes and lingering there longer, partly because of human-caused global warming. The administration had warned that delays in vaccine imports were inevitable, and the frigid weather threatened to derail the country’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
Rolling blackouts have been instituted by utilities from Minnesota to Texas and Mississippi to reduce the pressure on power grids that are already under stress from the high demand for heat and electricity.
According to a website that analyzes utility outage reports, more than 3 million customers are still without electricity in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, more than 200,000 more in four Appalachian states, and nearly as many in the Pacific Northwest.
The biggest power disruptions in the United States have been in Texas, where authorities asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency for 60 generators with a priority for hospitals and elderly homes. According to the agency, the state provided 35 shelters for more than 1,000 people.
“I know they can’t see us right now because they’re without electricity, but the president and I are thinking of them and hope that we can do everything possible through the signing of the emergency orders to get federal relief to support them,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a live interview on NBC’s Today program on Wednesday.
According to KSLA News, the weather also significantly disrupted water systems in the Texas cities of Houston, Fort Worth, Galveston, and Corpus Christi, as well as in Memphis, Tennessee, and Shreveport, Louisiana, where bottled water was brought in for patients and staff and city fire trucks delivered water to several hospitals.
Due to a significant decrease in water pressure caused by the weather, Houston residents were advised to boil their water if they had access to electricity.
Firefighters in Abilene, Texas, attempted to put out a house fire this week but were unsuccessful owing to poor water pressure, according to the city manager, Robert Hanna.
Traveling is still not advised in many parts of the United States due to dangerous roads and numerous aircraft cancellations. Multiple educational systems postponed or canceled in-person lessons.
Authorities in the Houston region said it was likely the fireplace the family was using to stay warm that started a fire that killed three young children and their grandmother. Authorities in Oregon have verified that four persons died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the Portland region on Tuesday.
Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth treated at least 13 children for carbon monoxide poisoning, and one parent passed away from the poisonous vapors, according to hospital officials. Texas was predicted to have above-freezing temperatures by the weekend.
