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Snowy road in Texas: Arctic cold
Photo: Brett Coomer / AP
Unusually icy winter weather with heavy snowfall has caused massive power outages in the southern US state of Texas.
According to the website poweroutage.us, the number of households without electricity rose to just under 4.4 million by Monday evening (local time).
In a number of houses and apartments, the mostly electric heating failed.
The Texan network agency Ercot had previously announced rotating shutdowns of parts of the network in order to prevent a complete breakdown of the supply.
About two million households should be affected, it was initially said.
Local electricity supplier Oncor warned customers that the widespread power outages are likely to continue until Tuesday.
Governor Greg Abbott said the National Guard was on duty to help move freezing people from their homes to one of 135 thermal centers.
There are around 3,300 state police officers, almost 600 members of the military, all-wheel drive vehicles from the forest administration and 700 snow plows in use.
State of emergency declared
A state of emergency was declared for the state on the border with Mexico, which is almost twice the size of Germany in terms of area.
US President Joe Biden also approved support from the civil protection agency Fema.
The airport in the metropolis Houston had to close until Tuesday noon due to the winter weather, at Dallas Fort Worth Airport there were numerous cancellations, in Austin all flights were canceled on Monday.
The authorities advised all citizens to stay in their houses and apartments because of snowy and icy roads.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner urged all residents who still have electricity to turn down their heating to stabilize the grid.
The local electricity supplier CenterPoint Energy spoke of around 1.2 million customers without electricity.
In Houston, temperatures dropped to minus 9 degrees Celsius.
"All the pipes were frozen over and we had no water in the house," said one resident.
In large parts of the state, residents had to deal with snow and ice.
The New York Times and local media reported that some of the blackouts were due to frozen wind turbines.
Wind power is an important source of energy in the state.
Mayor Turner called on the state leadership to take responsibility for the "magnitude of these blackouts" and to provide a statement.
The unusual cold weather front should continue until at least Tuesday and also affect states as far as the northeast of the country.
On Monday there were icy weather conditions in Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Kansas and Kentucky, among others.
Local media reported numerous traffic accidents.
In Oregon, about 300,000 households are without electricity, it said.
The National Weather Service (NWS) spoke of an "unprecedented and far-reaching, dangerous winter weather" from one coast to the other.
Snow and ice storm warnings are currently in place for over 150 million US citizens.
According to the weather service, there was "cold arctic air" in the center of the country.
For the city of Lincoln in Nebraska, for example, temperatures should fall below minus 30 degrees overnight, according to forecasts.
Even in Mexico there are hundreds of thousands without electricity
In Mexico, too, in the states of Nuevo León, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Durango and Zacatecas, almost five million households were temporarily without electricity on Monday, as the state electricity provider CFE said.
The supply has now been restored to around two thirds of the connections, it said.
The freezing of pipelines led to an interruption in the gas supply, it said.
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wit / dpa / AFP