Ted Cruz jokes about Cancun trip at CPAC as over a million Texans still lack drinkable water

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wanted to break the ice at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, so he warmed up the Florida crowd with a questionable joke about his weather preferences.

"I gotta say, Orlando is awesome," Cruz said. "It's not as nice as Cancun. But it's nice."

Cruz was alluding to the trip he took to Cancun last week in the midst of a massive snowstorm plaguing Texas. Cruz's trip lasted just 11 hours, but the storm — which resulted in a yet-unknown number of deaths and widespread power outages — is still impacting Texans, making his CPAC icebreaker all the more unfunny.

As of Wednesday, more than a million Texans still lacked drinkable water in their homes, with 1.2 million people facing "water disruptions," The Texas Tribune reports. Yulissa Gonzalez, a mother of three in North Texas, detailed to The Dallas Morning News how burst pipes have caused her apartment to flood and reek of mildew. Gonzalez is one of hundreds of people in the area still awaiting post-storm repairs, writes The Dallas Morning News. One plumbing company in Austin, Texas, has over 2,500 unfulfilled customer requests, reports the Tribune, and supply chain shortages have only made the increased number of requests more daunting.

Cruz, for his part, did help pass out at least one case of water last week.

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