
Like so many desperate Texans, Henry is struggling to stay warm without power.

Like so many desperate Texans, Henry is struggling to stay warm without power.

U.S. researchers have found the flu shot could prevent severe COVID-19 illness in children. And that’s not the only routine vaccine with potential to protect against it.

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El Paso doing ok because it does not depend on Texas grid. Read here.
Texas has its own power grid, which operates as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, covers 90% of the state. The other 10% includes El Paso, the upper Panhandle and a chunk of East Texas.
Credit: Justin Hamel for The Texas Tribune
While millions of Texans were left in the dark this week after an arctic blast pummeled the state, not every part of Texas experienced major electricity issues.
Texas has an unusual power setup. Unlike the other states in the union which are mostly interconnected, Texas has its own power grid. That grid, which operates as the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, covers 90% of the state. The other 10% includes El Paso, the upper Panhandle and a chunk of East Texas.
These areas, for various reasons including proximity, instead get their electricity from other grid providers. For example, the Panhandle is closer to Kansas than to Dallas.
The main culprit for the power outages in ERCOT’s coverage area was failures across Texas’ natural gas operations and supply chains due to the extreme temperatures. From frozen natural gas wells to frozen wind turbines, all power sources faced difficulties during the winter storm. Texans largely rely on natural gas for power and heat generation, especially during peak usage, experts said.
Energy and policy experts told The Texas Tribune this week that limited regulations on companies that generate power and a history of isolating Texas from federal oversight help explain the crisis. They said Texas’ decisions not to require equipment upgrades to withstand extreme winter temperatures and to operate mostly isolated from other grids in the U.S. left the power system unprepared for this week’s outages.
But the weather didn’t plunge other parts of the state into darkness their grids were equipped to withstand those frigid temperatures.
Take El Paso, for instance. El Paso’s power was originally all local, but it started looking for other resources in the 1960s as the population grew, including turning to a New Mexico power plant. Then in the late 1970s, El Paso Electric became part owners of the Palo Verde Nuclear generating station in Arizona.
“You look where El Paso is and people not from this area don’t understand. I can get from Los Angeles faster than I can get to Houston,” said Steven T. Buraczyk, senior vice president of operations for El Paso Electric.“Economically it just made more sense for us to be part of the Western grid because of where we’re located.”
El Paso also has access to the Montana Power Station, built on the east side of town after the hard freeze in 2011 that left the city without power and water. Buraczyk said they made several critical decisions after that storm to prevent a similar situation from happening in the future, including having its equipment being able to withstand low temperatures up of to -10 degrees.
“We went back and did some better insulation and weatherization to withstand colder temperatures,” said Buraczyk. “But the biggest thing, in my mind, is we built another power plant. It’s difficult to retrofit something that is 50 or 60 years old. And have as good results as when you’re just building it.”
Earlier this week, El Paso Electric spokesman Eddie Gutierrez told KTSM that “only 875 customers were impacted by an outage of less than five minutes” because they were better prepared this time around.
The Panhandle also escaped major damaged this week. Residents there have dealt with short rolling blackouts but nothing like the dayslong outages in the other parts of the state, reports KAMR. Most of the Texas Panhandle and South Plains get their power from Xcel Energy that’s serviced by the Southwest Power Pool. That power grid spans 14 states, which allows them to share power when there’s a need. The region SPP serves also experienced harsh weather conditions this week, which is why the Panhandle experience some power outages.
Xcel Energy Spokesman Wes Reeves told KAMR the company has spent time and effort weatherizing its power plants in the last decade.
The Beaumont area is serviced by Entergy, which also beefed up its weatherization efforts before the storm. That allowed them to have fewer long-term outages compared with other parts of the state, KHOU reports.
Beaumont residents still experienced rolling outages after its power grid, Midcontinent Independent System Operator, became overwhelmed by the all-time high demand for electricity. At one point this week, about 33,000 residents experienced these outages. On Thursday, Entergy said it hoped to restore power to its customers by the end of the day.
Disclosure: El Paso Electric Company and Entergy have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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A Dallas official said Thursday that the White House has called him to offer assistance during the unprecedented winter storm hitting Texas, but he has not heard from Gov. Greg Abbott (R).”I have…
Fresenius Kidney Care South Price in Austin on Feb. 18, 2021.
Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
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Michelle Adams-Walton, 58, was five minutes into her dialysis treatment in Leander, the needle in her arm circulating blood through a machine to filter it since her kidneys can not — when the power went out.
Nurses rushed to unhook patients from machines to prevent life-threatening blood clotting. She returned home, where the power was also going in and out, without treatment.
“It’s not too terribly bad if I’m just sitting. But if I have to move around, I’m definitely short of breath,” Adams-Walton, who has been on dialysis for 17 years due to chronic kidney disease, said after not receiving treatment for five days.
Adams-Walton’s treatment was delayed after a snowstorm devastated Texas’ energy infrastructure, causing mass power outages and depleting water reserves. As the storm’s fallout reverberates across the state, some of its more than 600 dialysis centers have also lost access to power and water, forcing patients to seek other locations for treatment. Unlike large hospital systems which were largely shielded from power outages, dialysis centers are smaller and spread out across the state, so many lost electricity.
Most dialysis patients who receive hemodialysis in a clinic — where their blood is circulated outside of their bodies — need three four-hour long treatments per week to live. Without dialysis, people with kidney failure have a build up of toxins and fluids that can become fatal within as short as a week.
Nim Kidd, the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said at a Wednesday press conference that the state is working to help dialysis patients.
He said dialysis facilities require a large amount of electricity and water to operate adding that an emergency medical task force is “moving people that need dialysis to places where dialysis can be delivered.”
More than 50,000 people in Texas need dialysis, according to an End Stage Renal Network report from 2019.
Adams-Walton said her center recommended she travel to a different location because it no longer had running water and it lacked a generator for back-up power. But she couldn’t make the 45-minute drive to an operating location in Round Rock in icy conditions and may have to go to a hospital.
Chakilla Robinson White, Texas group vice president for DaVita, a major dialysis provider, said centers are keeping in contact with all patients to support them.
“A number of our facilities have closed intermittently as power and water comes and goes,” White said. “We are coordinating with other health care providers, including hospitals, to help ensure that patients have continued access to care. We are also working to bring water tankers, generators and supplies to affected areas.”
Meanwhile, centers that are open are still dealing with the challenges of keeping vulnerable patients safe from COVID-19 exposure.
At the beginning of the week, Adams-Walton’s center changed from a schedule shift to a first-come, first-serve system to fit in treatments. But this caused a dozen people to show up in the lobby of her center at the same time, making social distancing for COVID-19 almost impossible.
“A lot of clinics are not set up to have social distancing in the lobbies, and a lot of the patients…don’t feel they should have to wear a mask…so it’s kind of precarious to be out in the lobby with other patients are not able to social distance,” she said.
Until she receives her next treatment, Adams-Walton has to avoid drinking fluids and intaking any foods that will add to her toxin levels, including anything with potassium or phosphorus in it. She said she thought dialysis centers would be better prepared since similar extreme weather events have occurred across the country.
“We need to have contingency plans, and they do. But there are some gaping holes there,” Adams-Walton said.
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Opinion: Facebook’s move is either a last-ditch attempt to gain concessions in Australia’s legislation or a simple cut-and-run, writes Diana Bossio for The Conversation.
The end-of-day totals from California public health websites for Wednesday, Feb. 17, reported 6,540 new case, bringing the total number of cases to 3,485,119.
The 14-day number of new cases, 9,777, is down 76.9% from the Jan. 1 high of 42,268.
There were 417 new deaths reported Wednesday, for a total of 47,924 people in California who have died from the virus. The 14-day average of 389.7 deaths as of Wednesday is down 28.4% from the Feb. 1 high of 543.1 average new deaths.
There were 8,566 people needing hospital care Wednesday, a 61.3% drop since the Jan. 1 high of 22,853.
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Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Johns Hopkins University, the World Health Organization, the California Department of Public Health, The Associated Press, reporting counties and news sources
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