Texas reeling from storms, power losses

The state was hit by more sleet and freezing rain on Wednesday that the NWS said could be "the worst of all the winter events over the past week".

A polar vortex, a weather pattern that usually concentrates only around the North Pole but is increasingly visiting lower-latitude areas, spread across Texas on Monday and Tuesday and also hit Louisiana and Mississippi.

The rare winter storm and freezing temperatures in Texas led to record-breaking demand for electricity that has overwhelmed the state power grid and left millions of people without power and heat for hours or days in freezing temperatures. And there is no certainty over when the power will go back on.

"We know this is hard. We continue to work as quickly and safely as possible to restore power," the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the power flow for some 26 million customers in the state, tweeted Wednesday morning. "We hope to reduce outages over the course of the day."

Unlike other states, Texas operates its own power grid. That means that when things are running smoothly, Texas can't export excess power to neighboring states. In the current crisis, it can't import power either.

"When it comes to electricity, what happens in Texas stays in Texas," Dan Cohan, associate professor of environmental engineering at Rice University told CNN. "That has really come back to bite us."

In the coastal city of Galveston, the county government called for refrigerated trucks to hold the bodies it expects to find in freezing, powerless houses.

In Harris County, where Houston is located, officials have received at least 300 calls of carbon monoxide poisoning from portable heaters. In the Houston area, one family succumbed to carbon monoxide from car exhausts in their garage, an 8-year-old girl and her mother passed out and died while on the phone, while another man died after flames spread from a fireplace.