The power crisis spurred by the massive winter storm hobbling Texas has also become a water crisis, with hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses dealing with burst pipes or ordered to boil water, as water utilities suffer from frozen wells and treatment plants run on backup power.

In Harris County, which includes Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, more than 1 million people have been affected by local water systems that have either issued boil-water notices or that cannot deliver water at all, said Brian Murray, a spokesman for the county emergency management agency.

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Residents in the Texas capital, Austin, were also told to boil water because of a power failure at the city’s largest water-treatment facility. And the city of Kyle, south of Austin, asked residents on Wednesday to suspend their water use until further notice because of a shortage.

“Water should only be used to sustain life at this point,” officials of the city of 48,000 said in an advisory. “We are close to running out of water supply in Kyle.”

For many Texans, the disruptions were an inconvenience. But others faced more dire consequences. At St. David’s South Austin Medical Center, officials were trying Wednesday night to fix a heating system that was failing because of low water pressure. They were forced to seek portable toilets and distribute bottles of water to patients and employees so they could wash their hands.

In San Antonio, Jesse Singh, 58, a Shell gas station owner, said that his father, Ram Singh, 80, was turned away from regularly scheduled dialysis treatments Tuesday and Thursday because his clinic was having water issues.

“It’s a dangerous situation,” the younger Singh said.

His other problems Thursday were indicative of the broader troubles still facing Texas, where some areas were being affected by a band of foul weather stretching from the Rio Grande to New York. As fresh snow fell, Singh was waiting with a few dozen other cars at a propane station that had not opened yet. He said he had low water pressure at his house. And his gas station had no fuel to sell and was running out of food at its convenience store because deliveries hadn’t arrived.

Thursday’s winter storm brought freezing rain, snow and temperatures that were “much below average,” a gut punch for Texans who have resorted to stoves, barbecue grills, gasoline generators and their vehicles to keep themselves warm.

Days of glacial weather have left at least 38 people dead nationwide, made many roads impassable, disrupted vaccine distribution and blanketed nearly three-quarters of the continental United States in snow.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas warned residents to brace for continued misery.

“Most of the state will be below freezing,” Abbott said in a media briefing Wednesday, adding that a respite from the cold snap would come only on Saturday.

There were also reasons for hope on Thursday morning. The state had just under 500,000 customers without power, down from millions in recent days. Murray, the Harris County official, said that restored power to water utilities should solve many of the water problems in the next day or so.

Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport, which had been forced to shut down Wednesday because of water supply issues, announced early Thursday morning that it had restored water in a limited capacity, and that flights would resume.