A man drags his daughters on a plastic sled in Austin, Texas.Bronte Wittpenn / AP
For the first time in its history, all Texas counties are under threat of a winter storm, which this Monday has registered sub-zero temperatures throughout its territory.
The state is the epicenter of an unusual cold wave that is hitting the southern and central United States with temperatures that had not been recorded for decades.
Due in part to unprecedented power demand, major companies have had to cut off power, leaving nearly four million Texas homes and businesses without power, according to a site tracing porweroutage.us.
The cuts, which historically tend to be 15 to 45 minutes, are slated to run through Tuesday afternoon.
Some airports and oil refineries have closed and car accidents number in the hundreds.
“We are dealing with larger-than-normal power generation outages due to frozen wind turbines and limited supplies of natural gas available to generating units,” Bill Magness, president of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) explained in a press release. .
In some areas of Dallas, the financial center of Texas, residents were without power and water due to freezing of pipes.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner has warned that America's fourth-most populous city may be in the dark until Tuesday.
Authorities have said that as the snow decreases and the icy wind gusts increase at night, the millions of homes without electricity are likely to increase.
The economic cost to the agriculture sector can be catastrophic.
Brownsville, the southernmost city in Texas along the US-Mexico border, witnessed snowfall for the third time since 1898. Warnings about the winter storm have extended Monday to all of Arkansas and most of it. from Louisiana, Mississippi, and western and northern Alabama as the cold snap makes its way northeast through the Tennessee and Ohio valleys.
More snow, sleet and ice are expected to fall through Tuesday afternoon from Oklahoma to New Hampshire.
The exceptional cold wave affects some 30 states in the country.
The winter storm occurs while the United States carries out its mass vaccination process against the coronavirus.
Texas and Tennessee have closed their vaccination sites, canceling appointments for the first or second dose until further notice.