houston. antonia you were speaking two days ago to a mother who had been driving around because her children needed their medicine at a certain temperature. that certain mother faces gas shortages and you re talking to people without water. what s it like for them? reporter: stephanie, the challenges of this week are starting to have a cumulative effect on people, particularly families that are low income. the lights, the power, the heat is starting to come back on for most people in the city of houston and in harris county, but that s being replaced by a water crisis. people don t have safe water to drink, or they don t have any water at all in many cases. i ve spoken to more families who have been driving around, going to grocery stores and gas stations, trying to find someone who can sell them drinkable water. i met with a family yesterday that took somebody s pool water so that they could boil it and allow their children to bathe in the water and to wash some of their c
overnight president biden calling governor abbott telling him he will in his words work relentlessly to get his state what they need. we re also learning from texas energy officials that the entire power grid was seconds and minutes away from a catastrophic failure that could have left the state in the dark for months. we re asking a texas congressman about that in a moment. plus, cruz damage control. the senator back in texas this morning with backlash building after he flew to cancun with his family while millions of his constituents shivered in the dark. we shouldn t have had to be without lights. i know it s freezing, but somebody is responsible for this. you ve got people dying out here. you ve got hypothermia, dying. you know? people s houses all busted up because of water and the pipes that busted. i m surprised mine didn t bust. lady behind me hers busted. and breaking this morning capitol police confirming dozens of officers are now under investigation, six sus
engulfing his state and constituents. right before he got on the plane, he basically made this poor decision he made, an adult, he blamed it apparently on his kids. my daughters asked if they could take a trip with some friends, and heidi and i agreed. so i flew down with them last night, dropped them off here and i m headed back to texas and back continuing to work. back to work in texas. as for the claims there, we have a fact check coming up. politically, civically, responsibility wise, it s a problem for senator cruz. we begin with the reason it s a problem, because so many people s lives hang in the balance. texas suffering this horrific crisis that we and so many journalists have been reporting on. the freezing weather has paralyzed huge swaths of the state. hundreds of thousands of people remain in the dark as of this hour, which means no heat, reports of food shortages mounting, residents scrambling for basic shelter. the storm has taken 21 lives, including a man
it is, you know, either you stay in your house and, you know, you are cold and you freeze to death and you have no food this is really what is happening here in houston. this is people s lives right now, right? or you go out and go from ho hotel to hotel and you risk getting covid. i feel like i m failing my children. when i think about the bigger picture my sadness turns to anger. we all knew this was coming for quite some time now. we all knew this was coming for quite some time now. in fact in 1989, and then again in february 2011, ten years ago exactly, a big winter storm hit texas and there was rolling blackouts. after that 2011 crisis the federal energy regulatory commission put out a report warning texas that it could happen all over again. they said you need to insulate your power infrastructure. texas did not heed that warning and nor did it half to. as we showed you texas is on it s own grid in order to keep the federal government out of it s business. there i
have made it clear they want kids back to school. but how to do that is much less clear. especially when it comes to teachers and vaccines. we re talk to the former head of the cdc about what students and teachers need to be safe. welcome to thursday, it is meet the press daily, i m chuck todd, the crisis in texas is deepening and it s not just a power grid disaster, the outages being described as the largest forced blackout in american history are also contributing to a weather crisis, a flood crisis and of course all of it is a major leadership crisis for elected leaders in the state of texas. millions of texans are under boil-water advisories, hard to do when you don t have reliable power to generate the heat needed to boil said water. hundreds of thousands of texans are living in areas where water systems are totally nonoperational. you can t boil water that doesn t come out of the tap either. the state s food supply infrastructure is failing in many places as well