The Forest v The Trees

Why Texas’ mass power outages continue to happen

“It’s like the big, bad wolf: Huff and puff and blow the house down. And I don't think any utility or city designs for weather like that, at least not weather that frequent.”

via @alereports + @emfoxhall https://t.co/wPeM7xLlFu

— Alejandro Serrano (@serrano_alej) July 18, 2024

Been kinda hoping to find this information;

Trees in Houston faced significant stress due to a series of severe weather events over the past 15 years, including extreme drought in 2011, flooding during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the winter freeze in 2021 and intense heat in 2022 and 2023, said Gretchen Riley, a forest systems department head at Texas A&M Forest Service. Riley said these events have weakened many trees, making them more vulnerable to damage from storms and high winds. 

Houston has approximately 36 million trees in the city, according to an online tree census maintained by Texas A&M Forest Service and the U.S. Forest Service. Riley described Beryl as potentially being "the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back" for many of them. CenterPoint reported on Sunday that its workers had removed more than 18,600 trees impacting lines so far.

You can’t “trim your trees” out of that problem. And the weather of the past 15 years is a large part of the reason so many trees went down so easily. We’re returning to a “normal” rain pattern this summer in Houston, but it’s been so abnormal for years (especially last summer, one of the worst droughts in decades), every rain cloud seems like a miracle as blessing. But it just stresses the trees more.

It’s always something.

Two more trees (“more” than the half-dozen that went down in the two blocks of my neighborhood during the derecho earlier) went down on my street from Beryl. Neither took down power lines, but unless you virtually denude Houston, this problem (trees v power lines) is going to persist.

Greg Abbott continues to be as worthless as tits on a boat hog. 🐗  (Abbott proclaimed he was going to make CenterPointless clear “vegetation” from any risk to power lines. As the Tribune article points out, only the Lege can give CenterPointless the authority to do that.)