HOUSTON, Feb 22 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Millions of Texans were still without
safe water as officials fielded angry complaints over shockingly
large power bills spawned by a cold weather crisis that Houston’s mayor said was ultimately preventable.
The frigid air mass that paralyzed parts of the southern and central United
States early in the week claimed more than 70 lives, left millions
temporarily without power and froze water lines.
“All of what happened this week was foreseeable and preventable,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told CBS’s “Face the Nation,” saying it had long been clear that the independent electric grid in Texas was vulnerable to extreme weather.
Turner said Houston, the fourth-largest US city, still needed both plumbing
supplies and plumbers, but was making progress in restoring service.
Both Houston and nearby Galveston on Sunday lifted orders for residents to
boil drinking water.
But some 28,000 households remained without electricity on Sunday, the
poweroutage.us website said, and many Texans were suffering an added insult: residential electric bills sometimes running into the thousands of dollars, with one as high as $16,000.
While most of the state’s utility customers are on fixed-rate plans, some
had signed up to variable-rate plans that can save money in fair weather but produce explosive increases in frigid temperatures.
Governor Greg Abbott met with legislators of both parties Saturday to
discuss the billing problem and said, “We have a responsibility to protect
Texans from spikes in their energy bills.”
For his part, Turner said “those exorbitant costs (should be) borne by the
state of Texas, and not the individual consumers who did not cause this
catastrophe.”
President Joe Biden on Saturday issued a major-disaster declaration for
much of the state, providing badly needed financial and administrative aid.
His spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Sunday that Biden hoped to visit Texas “as
early as this week” if he could do so without interfering with recovery
efforts.
Michael McCaul, a Republican congressman from Texas, said the financial
impact of the weather crisis could equal that of Hurricane Harvey, a
devastating 2017 storm that caused an estimated $125 billion in damages.
He said Biden’s emergency declaration could provide funds to help users pay their exorbitant electric bills.
State and local officials have demanded investigations of how the power
crisis unfolded so disastrously.
A US senator, Tina Smith, a Democrat of Minnesota, has called for a federal
investigation. She said spot prices of natural gas had spiked by up to 100
times normal rates, and utilities passed the higher rates on to customers. — NNN-AGENCIES