LUBBOCK: Hundreds of thousands of homes in Texas faced a fourth day without heat on Thursday after utilities made some progress restoring power and the winter storm that crippled the electrical grid moved out of the state.

The crisis that has gripped the country’s second-largest state by area was set to continue, however, with millions of people still without access to water, many struggling to find food, and freezing temperatures expected through the weekend.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), a cooperative responsible for 90 per cent of the state’s electricity, said in a statement that it had made “significant progress” in restoring electricity to homes. It did not provide figures.

At present some 504,000 Texas households were without power, down from around 2.7 million on Wednesday, according to poweroutage.us, a website that tracks outages.

Judge Lina Hidalgo, the top elected official in Harris County, which encompasses Houston, said that the number of homes without power in her county had fallen to 46,000 from nearly a million the previous night. She warned of challenges ahead.

“The water and food impacts of the winter weather continue, and there will be a hard freeze tonight, which could cause additional impacts to infrastructure,” Hidalgo wrote on Twitter.

Published in Dawn, February 19th, 2021