'This Is Extremely Dangerous': Texans in Peril at Home, on Road

[marmar]

(Bloomberg) Texans awoke Monday morning to discover that warnings of rolling power outages had escalated into hours-long blackouts. Instead of a chilly 30 minutes without TV, cue frantic calls to elderly relatives, last-minute hotel bookings, shopping trips for propane canisters and fielding emails from the car.

As the day unfolded, the scale of the crisis gripping the state threatened to take on a darker dimension. The National Guard was deployed to get old people into warming shelters. All air travel in and out of Houston was shut, and Covid-19 vaccination efforts faced potential disruption, with city officials racing to utilize more than 8,000 vaccine doses after a storage facility lost back-up power.

“It was only supposed to be for one to two hours, which seemed manageable,” said Isha Elhence, a 26-year-old Dallas resident who lost power around 2 a.m. Monday, summing up the general mood of haplessness. “Now it’s kind of indefinite with no updates, so we’re unsure of what we’re supposed to be doing.” ................(more)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-15/-this-is-extremely-dangerous-texans-in-peril-at-home-on-road