Some Houston residents fled their homes with busted heating systems and water pipes and huddled together at the Gallery furniture store, which opened its doors as a warming center to people trying to escape the cold, the National Weather Service said.

Historically low temperatures in the region would continue for days, and some Texas officials warned that the power outages were likely to persist.

Harris County Judge Lena Hidalgo, the top official in the state's most populous county, which includes Houston, said the storms were straining not on Lee the local electric grid but triggering a cascade of effects, including lost water pressure, carbon monoxide poisoning and halted cove in 19 vaccinations.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the states independent power grid, has come under increasing fire for the crisis, and Judge Hidalgo said she did not trust that it had a handle on the situation.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for reforms and demanded that state lawmakers investigator khat, which is not subject to federal oversight because it is not part of the national grid.

On Tuesday, Abbott also pointed the finger at frozen wind turbines amid the massive grid failure, FEMA has supplied generators to Texas.

On Wednesday, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the federal government was deploying emergency resource is to the state and pushed back against the blame being thrust on renewable energy sources.

There has been some inaccurate accusations out there that renewables caused failures in Texas is power grid, and actually, numerous reports have actually shown the contrary that it was failures in coal and natural gas that contributed to the state's power shortages.

And officials at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state's power grid, have gone so far as to say that failures in wind and solar were the least significant factors.

Many have blamed the power failures on a lack of preparedness.

But the deregulated energy market in Texas gives little financial incentives for operators to prepare for the rare about of intensely cold weather, an issue critics have been pointing out for years.