A beloved 84-year-old grandmother froze to death overnight on Monday in her northeast Houston apartment without power or water, according to her family. As if that wasn t heartbreaking enough, the family said robbers ransacked their grandmother s apartment nearly a day after she died. Here s their story
In marathon legislative hearings, Texas lawmakers grilled public regulators and energy grid officials about how power outages happened and why Texans weren t given more warnings about the danger.
But policy observers blamed the power system failure on the legislators and state agencies, who they say did not properly heed the warnings of previous storms or account for more extreme weather events warned of by climate scientists. Instead, Texas prioritized the free market.
Residents in West Houston meet to organize a rent strike.
While many Houstonians recovered from winter storm damages within days, others are still waiting for running water to be restored.
But at the Villas del Paseo apartment complex in West Houston, renters were without water for more than three weeks.
Organizers with the Houston Tenants Union say about half of residents in the 383-unit complex are participating in a rent strike after deciding not to pay rent on March 1. So far, they say none of the residents have gotten an eviction notice.
Ally Torres urged her neighbors to join the strike at a community meeting last weekend.
The unprecedented winter storm that hit Texas on Valentine s Day was not wholly unexpected. The forecast for unusually cold temperatures in Houston had many of us scrambling to wrap our pipes and stock up on comfort snacks. For Houston gardeners, however, it meant a last look at our budding fruit trees and tropical plants that had enjoyed several winters without a hard freeze.
I was one of those depressed gardeners. I spent several hours in my backyard sipping wine and staring at my humongous, blooming Angel s Trumpet (brugmansia) and my climbing rose with its just-opening pink blossoms. I harvested the Japanese mustard greens that I had planted in the fall and some of the lettuce. I dug up the root-bound peach tree that had grown through its plastic pot and into the ground, accidentally cutting off one of its main roots. Still hoping for its survival, I dragged it in a storage tub into the garage. My family was recruited into hauling the multitude of potted plants into the house, l
Well before the sun finally broke through the cloudy and icy haze in Texas Rio Grande Valley last week, Dale Murden knew he was in for a bad spell.
After a few days of clearer skies and warmer weather let him assess the damage to his grapefruit orchard in Harlingen more closely, the South Texas citrus grower confirmed his fears. As time goes on, it ll start to look worse, said Murden, who is also the president of Hidalgo County-based Texas Citrus Mutual.
The winter storm that paralyzed Texas for days last week is going to have lasting effects on Murden and his fellow citrus growers in the Rio Grande Valley after the extended freeze killed millions of pounds of citrus. The storm also brought the state s dairy industry, concentrated in the Panhandle, to a near standstill when widespread power outages halted processing.
As the city of Houston leaders continue the fight to keep COVID-19 under control while trying to recover from a historic winter storm, Mayor Sylvester Turner says though help is underway, there's still a long way to go.