you are live in the cnn qwest newsroom, i m paula reid in washington. a monster winter storm has claimed the lives of 16 people and has cut power and electricity. the u.s. department is declaring an emergency for the texas power grid to aid its capacity and this is due to a shortage of electricity. the emergency declaration allows the state s energy provider to exceed environmental emissions limits until usage drops. in new york, a dire situation. hundreds of people have likely been trapped inside their vehicles since yesterday. that includes an 85-year-old grandmother and her son. they ve been turning the car on and off for heat and to save gas. sub-zero temperatures are widespread across the country and more than 750,000 customers remain without power. the power grid operator for 13 states is now asking residents to reduce their power usage to avoid widespread outages. holiday travel by road and air has been disrupted, and today alone more than 2600 flightses have be
of the conservation efforts to keep us from having to take more severe measures potentially rotating customer outages which is what we re trying to prevent and conservation helps a lot. when can you expect customers to return to normal, normal everyday power usage? we re thinking tomorrow afternoon should be fine and many customers will be unaffected by this, but the customers who do have the opportunity to take some measures, that will be very helpful because we ve seen it work. i don t know if we said this in the introduction, but can you just clarify. how does someone know if this applies to them? what is the area? how can they find out? so pjm is 13 states and the district of columbia. we go from the new york border down to north carolina, out to chicago and down to tennessee. our thanks to michael bryson for all of that important information. let s go to cnn s carlos suarez
the airline at this hour. folks that were maybe trying to get a car rental, and they were hoping to maybe get on the road and make it to their final destination apparently according to a few passengers and they went to car rentals and they ve all been booked out and they re not going to get a car rental and make it home in time. the re-booking counter and you walk over a few feet over to the security check line. there s not much of a line. at this point it seems like the early morning crowd got up here and they were able to get on to their flights and we re seeing the flights after flights being canceled. paula? carlos suarez, thank you for that report. frightening moments for shoppers after a gunman opened fire at the mall of america last night. video posted shows the moment gunshots went off in the background. so did you find the purse that you wanted? ooh! [ bleep ]. 19-year-old man was killed in