From the newsroom of the Washington Post.

Hi there is the mayor in Marissa Lang with the Washington Post.

Hey it's Dossie, I want to pick your brain on the...

Hi, my name is Janet Johnson.

This is Post Reports.

I'm Martine Powers.

It's Wednesday, February 17th.

Today, why it's so cold in Texas and what went wrong with the power grid?

Plus attempting to land a car on Mars.

So Texas right now suffering a one two punch.

First, they had historically low temperatures, especially Tuesday night, the coldest air since 1989.

This is Matthew Capucci and as you can probably tell, he is a meteorologist at the post.

And now they had one winter storm, a second one ongoing currently, moving east out of the area,

but after dropping about a half inch to three inches of snow across much of the DFW Metroplex,

and of course icing, significantly icing over a third of an inch in Austin.

And do we know how many people have died so far in Texas because of these ultra low temperatures?

So far, latest words are more than a dozen, but I expect that number to climb.

And I think this is one of those cases where we might actually see a higher death toll than we've seen with some hurricanes in the past,

especially because this is one of those excess mortality cases.

We're not seeing people who are being hit by debris or things like that like you'd seen a hurricane.

This is really disproportionately affecting the elderly, the vulnerable people who are in lower income brackets

because they're the ones who don't really have the means to escape the cold air.

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