AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – A huge swath of the U.S. braced Tuesday for a major winter storm that was expected to dump heavy snow in the Rockies, ice highways, disrupt travel across the Midwest and plunge temperatures below freezing in Texas.
The blast of winter weather comes nearly a year after a catastrophic freeze that devastated Texas’ power grid and knocked power out for days, causing hundreds of deaths in one of the worst blackouts in U.S. history. The forecast this week, however, does not call for the same prolonged and frigid temperatures like the February 2021 storm.
“No one can guarantee that there won’t be any” outages caused by demand on the grid, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said during a briefing in Austin, where state officials defended their readiness for the days ahead. “But what we will work to achieve, and what we’re prepared to achieve is that power is going to stay on across the entire state.”
In November, Abbott told Austin television station KTBC ahead of winter that “I can guarantee the lights will stay on.”
Abbott, whose handling of last year’s blackouts is a top line of attack for Democrats as the Republican seeks a third term in 2022, said thousands of miles of roads in Texas will become “extraordinarily dangerous” over the coming days. But he said the state’s power grid had enough capacity to handle the expected surge in demand this week once temperatures plummet.