Texas weather: President Biden declares major disaster
Coldwave
How the score is calculated
The score starts at 8. It adds points from recorded affected, deaths, displaced and casualty counts, plus terms found in the story title, event type or status. For each count, only its highest matching band is used.
- Affected people
- 1–999: +5 · 1,000–9,999: +12 · 10,000–99,999: +20 · 100,000–999,999: +28 · 1 million+: +35
- Deaths
- 1–9: +8 · 10–99: +14 · 100–999: +22 · 1,000+: +30
- Displaced people
- 1–9,999: +6 · 10,000–99,999: +12 · 100,000+: +18
- Casualties
- 100 or more: +8
- Story wording
- +10 for terms such as catastrophe, famine, war, conflict, major earthquake, mass casualty or critical. Otherwise, +5 for active, ongoing, emergency, outbreak, cyclone or hurricane.
Score bands: Watch 0–24 · Moderate 25–49 · High 50–74 · Critical 75–100. Scores are capped at 100. Missing or unparseable figures add no points.
This is a rule-based WorldsAid triage indicator, not an official or independently validated classification. It does not account for recency or local context, and it can understate events with incomplete reporting. Check the linked sources.
Historical record
Status: CLOSED · Imported 2026-10-07
Closed for this historical import at the site owner’s request; not a new assessment of current conditions.
In brief
- What happenedPresident Joe Biden has declared a major disaster in Texas, clearing the way for more federal funds to be spent on relief efforts in the US state.
- How many affectedDeaths: 60
- What help is neededPower is returning across Texas and temperatures are set to rise, but at least 14 million people still have difficulty accessing clean water.
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
President Joe Biden has declared a major disaster in Texas, clearing the way for more federal funds to be spent on relief efforts in the US state. Power is returning across Texas and temperatures are set to rise, but at least 14 million people still have difficulty accessing clean water. Mr Biden has said he will visit Texas as long as his presence is not a burden on relief efforts. Nearly 60 deaths have been attributed to cold weather across the US . The administration had already declared a state of emergency for Texas, along with Oklahoma and Louisiana. In a statement on Texas released by the White House, President Biden said he had "ordered federal assistance to supplement state and local recovery efforts in the areas affected by severe winter storms". "Assistance can include grants for temporary housing and home repairs, low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses, and other programmes to help individuals and business owners recover from the effects of the disaster," the statement said. Mr Biden has been in touch with the mayors of some of Texas' biggest cities, such as Houston, Austin and Dallas, to ensure they have access to government resources, an administration official said. Texas family 'trying to keep warm' How to stay safe in freezing weather In pictures: Snow blankets Texas Several other southern states hit by snow and ice storms this week have also reported water service outages. Winter weather also cut off water in the city of Jackson, Mississippi - home to around 150,000 people - as well as the largest county in Tennessee that includes the city of Memphis, with more than 651,000 residents. City officials in Jackson say water treatment plants are now running again, but 43,000 households still have no or low water pressure, WLBT TV reports. Across the US South, a region unaccustomed to such frigid temperatures, people whose pipes have frozen have taken to boiling snow to make water. What is happening in Texas? The south-western state's energy grid was overwhelmed by a surge in demand for heat as temperatures plummeted to 30-year lows, hitting 0F (-18C) earlier this week. Nearly 80,000 homes were still without electricity on Saturday morning. Earlier this week, amid freezing temperatures as many as 3.3 million homes and businesses were without power. But the power company, Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said consumers were no longer being asked to conserve energy. Close to half of the state's population have faced some disruption of water services as hundreds of water systems have been damaged by the freeze. Austin, the state's capital, lost 325 million gallons (1.2 billion litres) of water when pipes burst.
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against 1 attributed source, cleaned feed formatting and checked the crisis, place and reporting date. 1 human-impact figure was separated from the narrative and dated where the source allowed. Earlier observations remain in the evidence history instead of being silently overwritten.
Verified figures
- Deaths
- 60 retained at 2021-02-21
What we knew when
- WorldsAid record entered the retained historical dataset.
- Last verification represented by this immutable snapshot.
Earlier figures are never replaced by later values; additional observations are retained as new ledger entries.
Provenance
This page renders the last verified WorldsAid cache directly in HTML. It does not treat generated summaries as primary evidence.
Cached dataset: worldsai_drup771.sql.gz
Verified
SHA-256 11323950ad35db241e3267f12696aa20b773fd45a7080097d9236160c9ff46ca