More than 14 million Texans remained without safe drinking water and 20,200 still had no power on Sunday evening, as the state continued to battle the devastating downfall from last week’s historic storm.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner rebuked state officials over the disaster, saying Texas’s power crisis was ‘visionary and preventable’.
“The reality is that climate change is real. It’s real, and these big storms can happen anytime, “he said on CBS’s” Face the Nation “.
“The system needs to be adapted to the weather. You need to maintain adequate reserves. And we need to open our Texas grid because right now we have a closed grid.
“Let me just say that, whatever happened last week was watchable and preventable,” Turner said.
Texas is the only state in the continental United States that has run its own stand-alone electricity grid and has not been forced to adapt to the weather because it is not subject to federal oversight.
Turner said he pushed for a bill in 2011 that would require the company that administers the state’s power grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, to “ensure enough reserves to prevent blackouts Was, “but lawmakers in Austin refused to listen.
Turner said that because of being insulted by the injury, the Texans, who did not lose electricity, collided with skyrocketing electricity bills in the wake of the storm as they tried to stay warm.
“For these exorbitant costs – it is not consumers who must assume that costs. They are not at fault for what happened this week, ”he said.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) also gave a slam guard to protect the Lone Star State from a blizzard.
During a Lower East Side press conference in Manhattan, Schumer said, “The bottom line is that Texas thought it could go it alone and built a system that ignored climate change.”
“It was not said which is flexible, and now Texas is paying the price,” Schumer said. “I hope they have learned a lesson.”
The storm, which swept into a large swing in the US last week, brought record-low temperatures and unprecedented snowfall, powering millions of Texas people and crippling parts of the state’s water system.
It killed more than 70 people nationwide, many in Texas.
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