More than 330,000 customers were without power from Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee up through Ohio and into New York, Poweroutage.us showed on Friday after an ice storm downed power lines and trees across the area, AlJazeera reported.
Freezing rain and snow weighed down tree limbs and encrusted power lines and brought rare measurable snowfall and hundreds of power outages to parts of the southern state of Texas.
Power restoration could take days, said Gale Carson, the utility’s spokeswoman. “It’s not going to be a quick process,” she said.
The major storm comes nearly a year after a catastrophic freeze in Texas in February 2021 that buckled the state’s power grid for days, leaving millions without power and leading to hundreds of deaths. It became one of the worst blackouts in US history.
Facing a new test of Texas’ grid, Republican Governor Greg Abbott said it was holding up and on track to have more than enough power to get through the storm. Texas had about 20,000 outages on Friday morning, nowhere close to the 4 million reported in 2021.
Abbott and local officials said Thursday’s power outages were due to high winds or icy and downed transmission lines, not grid failures.
Six people were taken to a hospital after a 16-vehicle crash on a Memphis highway. Two were in critical condition, the Memphis Fire Department said on Twitter. Four others suffered non-critical injuries.
ZZ/PR