U.S. facing more storms, power outages

There are now no plans to use federal troops for ground-based support in Texas, though FEMA will be sending non-military personnel, the official said.

But Kathuria and some other doctors in Texas are saying they have never seen a more harrowing week than this one.

Two large hospitals in the city reported no running water, leading to the cancellation of nonemergency procedures through at least Friday. Another in Houston had to haul in water on trucks to flush toilets.

As well as property damage, which the Insurance Council of Texas expects will be the majority of the industry loss, there are also impacts to energy infrastructure and other critical systems to consider, as well as business interruption.

Water pressure dropped after lines froze, with many people leaving taps dripping to prevent pipes from icing up, said Toby Baker, executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Federal Emergency Management Agency acting administrator Bob Fenton said teams in Texas were distributing fuel, water, blankets and other supplies.

Lisa Thomas said her driveway on a hill in Jackson was a sheet of ice. Her husband, who is on a defibrillator and heart monitor, has only enough heart medication to get him through Sunday because she hasn't been able to go to the pharmacy.

Many people still don't have water or lack power to boil it.

As electricity companies struggle to get power restored, Austin-Bergstrom International Airport resumed flights on Wednesday after a two-day hiatus caused by heavy snowfall.

100 million Americans braced for more cold, ice and snow
Winter storm watches were in effect from Baltimore to Boston, and Texas braced for more icy rain and possibly more snow. Travel remains ill-advised in much of the nation, with highways treacherous and thousands of flights cancelled.

President Biden speaks to the press before departing the White House for Milwaukee on Tuesday. "We are working around the clock to restore power to Texans", ERCOT president Bill Magness said in a statement.

A shopper at an H-E-B Plus! supermarket faces empty shelves in the Flour Bluff neighborhood of Corpus Christi, Texas, Feb. 18, 2021.

(CNN)President Joe Biden said on Friday that he plans to travel to Texas but does not want a presidential trip to put any additional strain on a state grappling with an extreme weather crisis.

"Because this is a statewide emergency situation that is also impacting other hospitals within the Austin area, no one hospital now has the capacity to accept transport of a large number of patients", St. David's South Austin Medical Center CEO David Huffstutler said in a statement. According to reports, the agency sent 60 generators to the Lone Star State, but state officials did not provide instructions on how they should be delivered.

The storms also left more than 335,000 from Virginia to Louisiana without power and about 71,000 in OR were still enduring a weeklong outage following a massive ice and snow storm.

In Texas, an Abilene man died in his bed in a house that was the same temperature as outside.

But the remaining Texas outages were mostly weather-related, according to the state's grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

But electrical grid operators in Texas were reporting Friday that power transmission had returned to normal, though some small outages remained.