Southern US battles winter freeze as thousands suffer power outage in Texas

A mess of ice, sleet and snow lingered across much of the southern US into Thursday, as thousands in Texas endured freezing temperatures with no power, including many in the state capital, Austin.

Treacherous driving conditions had resulted in at least eight deaths on slick roads since Monday, including seven in Texas and one in Arkansas. The Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott, urged people not to drive.

A warming trend was forecast to bring relief from the deadly storm on Thursday.

More than 390,000 customers in Texas were without power early Thursday as trees, heavy with ice, buckled onto power lines, according to PowerOutage.com, a website tracking utility reports.

More than 150,000 outages were in Austin, where the city utility warned residents who had been without electricity that lights and heat may not come back on until later on Thursday.

Pablo Vegas, who leads the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, had promised the state electrical grid and natural gas supply would be reliable and there would not be a repeat of the February 2021 blackouts when the grid was on the brink of total failure.

School systems in the Dallas and Austin areas, plus many in Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee, planned to be closed on Thursday as bands of winter precipitation continued to push through.

Nearly 700 flights had been canceled by Thursday morning, according to the flight tracking service FlightAware.com. That followed thousands of cancelations and delays since frigid weather set in on Monday.

Watches and warnings about wintry conditions were issued for an area stretching along the west Texas border with Mexico through Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana and into western Tennessee and northern Mississippi.