Ice Storm Wreaks Havoc

C APITAL Highlights

Residents in Central and Northeast Texas are still cleaning up after a winter storm last week snapped power lines and tree limbs, causing widespread power outages, canceled flights and damage to homes and vehicles.

At its peak, nearly 400,000 Texas households were without power, according to poweroutage. us. As of Sunday, that number had dropped to 62,456.

The outages were due to downed power lines, not by problems with the state’s power grid. The Texas Railroad Commission said the state’s natural gas supply also held steady, with natural gas utilities reporting no service issues during the storm.

Airports in the state’s metropolitan areas reported several hundred flight cancellations because of icy conditions. Many schools in the Dallas area and around Austin were closed for the entire week.

The Texas Department of Insurance offered some advice to homeowners dealing with damage caused by fallen tree branches landing on vehicles and homes. That includes taking photos of the damage before moving the tree; making temporary repairs and contact your insurance agent as soon as possible; and saving all receipts for labor and repair materials to be reimbursed. While the danger from last week’s storm has largely passed, the Texas Department of State Health Services provided advice for future winter events, urging people to use extreme caution with electric generators and heaters that produce carbon monoxide.

Generators should only be used outdoors, at least 10 feet away from buildings. Outdoor grills, camp stoves and other heaters that produced carbon monoxide should only be used outside. Carbon monoxide is an odorless and colorless gas that can cause death.

The number of new cases of COVID-19 in Texas during the past week rose to 38,947, more than 15,000 from the previous week, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University.

The center reported 400 deaths in the state, also a marked increase. Officials reported 2,142 lab-confirmed COVID-19 hospitalizations, down a few hundred from the previous week.

Gary Borders is a veteran award-winning Texas journalist. He published a number of community newspapers in Texas during a 30-year span, including in Longview, Fort Stockton, Nacogdoches, and Cedar Park. Email: gborders@texaspress.com.