One family has resorted to burning their toddler’s toy blocks as firewood. Others are tearing down fences to burn. This is how Texans are surviving utilities failure.

“The message though is, number one, the power is fragile because of the impacts throughout, and number two, we now have water issues,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo told CNN. “Hospitals have issues. We have water pressure issues. We’re all on boil-water notices and folks are having trouble accessing food.”

“I just started kind of grabbing my canvasses off the wall, and breaking them and throwing them into the fire,” she said.

Another round of harsh weather is forecast. A winter weather warning is in effect from Central to East Texas, including Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and Amarillo, according to CNN meteorologist Michael Guy. Snow is expected to fall in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with ice and freezing rain farther south as far as Laredo and Corpus Christi.

Temperatures will rise Friday, yet overnight conditions throughout the weekend will remain below freezing. Icing on bridges and overpasses will remain a threat until late Sunday into Monday.

Spillover effects of no power for days

Smita Pande, of Crestview, told CNN she and others may have to use melted snow for drinking water when their bottled water runs out.

“We didn’t anticipate the water to be shut off, but once it did, we assumed a ‘worst case scenario’ type of thing and just grabbed snow off the balcony and put into kettles and pots to use for drinking water in case we don’t get water back anytime soon,” Pande said. “If the power outage is any indication of how long that’ll be, then we are going to be boiling snow for a while.”

The outages have also led to food shortages as Texans scramble for needed supplies and scrounge for a hot meal.

“Grocery stores are already unable to get shipments of dairy products. Store shelves are already empty,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said. “We’re looking at a food supply chain problem like we’ve never seen before, even with Covid-19.”

Philip Shelley, a resident of Fort Worth, told CNN that he, his wife Amber and 11-month-old daughter, Ava, are struggling to stay warm and fed. Amber is pregnant and due April 4.

“(Ava) is down to half a can of formula,” Philip said. “Stores are out if not extremely low on food. Most of our food in the refrigerator is spoiled. Freezer food is close to thawed but we have no way to heat it up.”

Why the electric grid neared collapse

Customers wait in line to enter Frontier Fiesta on Wednesday in Houston.

A winter weather system brought unusually frigid temperatures to much of the central US over the past few days. The deep freeze caused demand for power and heating to skyrocket even as it knocked out Texas’s natural gas, coal, wind and nuclear facilities, which were not ready to function in such cold weather.

The storm has caused serious outages across the country, including in Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky. But the outages were most severe in Texas because the state runs on its own electric grid, ERCOT — a way to avoid federal regulation — and cannot easily borrow power from other states.

US Rep. Marc Veasey, a Democrat who represents parts of Fort Worth and Dallas, said he learned from an industry executive that the power grid was just minutes from failing on Monday before state agency officials initiated emergency rolling outages.

“I want people to know that we were minutes away from the entire grid crashing,” he told CNN’s Ed Lavandera.

As with any systemic failure, the blame is spreading far and wide. Gov. Abbott said Wednesday afternoon that an investigation of ERCOT, Texas’ power supply operator, is slated to begin next week.

“We have learned really in a tragic way that ERCOT and the state had not prepared to have enough backup power to have resilient power supply to face the historic weather that we all really knew was coming,” Judge Hidalgo said.