In Texas, Biden Brings Empathy and White House Security Official Lays Out State’s Mistakes
U.S. President Joe Biden met with volunteers at a food bank, toured a health center and visited an emergency operations facility on Friday to assess recovery efforts from a severe Texas winter storm while an aide blamed…
U.S. President Joe Biden met with volunteers at a food bank, toured a health center and visited an emergency operations facility on Friday to assess recovery efforts from a severe Texas winter storm while an aide blamed state government for being unprepared.
Biden and his wife Jill Biden landed in Houston where he met Republican Governor Greg Abbott and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner to discuss the recovery from last week’s storm, which caused serious damage to homes and businesses, left millions without power or clean water for days, and killed at least two dozen.
At the food bank, Biden saw rows and rows of packaged food, from pasta to applesauce, stacked in a large warehouse and watched conveyors move slowly as volunteers pulled food out of boxes and put them in containers for delivery.
Biden, a Democrat, has sought to bring consolation and empathy to the hard-hit state, which leans heavily Republican.
But his deputy national security adviser, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, laid responsibility Friday on the Texas government for foregoing energy regulation that could have left it better prepared.
“Texas has chosen not to make the kinds of decisions that would provide for the supplies that you would keep for an emergency, that is, to invest in a kind of resilience that other states which are regulated are required to invest in,” she said.
“They don’t have the backup in terms of supply or generation capability that they needed to have in this crisis,” she said, adding the state had the capacity to change that.
For 10 days this month, Texas was hit by an unusually prolonged period of very low temperatures. Electricity consumption surged, while many generating units failed to start up owing to frozen instrumentation, iced turbine blades and insufficient fuel supplies.
The state’s Republican leaders have come under fire for not heeding warnings that the Texas power grid needed significant upgrades to defend against deep freezes.