The Alamo is under two inches of snow. The daytime temperature for Austin is 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s 19 in Houston, 12 in Dallas, and 0 degrees in the panhandle. Texas, home to twenty-nine million Americans, is experiencing one of its coldest winters ever. Nearly unprecedented snow and ice have also created dangerous conditions on roads and have caused at least twenty-three deaths so far.

And to make matters much worse, Texas’s electricity grid is utterly failing. Most of the state’s vast wind power was knocked out of commission days ago due to the freezing temperatures, and about half of its gas-powered plants went off-line due to full gas pipelines. Blackouts across the state left over 2 million homes without power on Monday, 4 million on Tuesday, and still 2.7 million on Wednesday, during some of the coldest days the state has ever recorded. Moreover, rolling blackouts meant to last fifteen to forty-five minutes at a time have actually lasted over twenty-four hours for many Texans, a testament to the colossal failure of the electrical infrastructure.

Unfortunately, in Texas, no electricity also means no heat. Like the rest of the South, about three-fifths of the state’s households rely on electricity rather than gas for home heating. And their homes are built to release heat in hot weather, not retain heat in cold weather. In short: while the power’s out, there’s serious risk of freezing to death, particularly among the elderly and the poor.