Well… 🤷🏻‍♂️

Texas power outage surpasses 2021 record after ice stormhttps://t.co/Tmk5C5o9Lf

— Raw Story (@RawStory) February 5, 2023

After Hurricane Ike waltzed through Houston we were without power at Chez Adventus for at least 10 days. Memory says it was closer to three weeks, but memory is not to be trusted.

A tornado spun off from the storm walked between the houses in my block, where the power lines run, and spilled trees into them, including a very large pine 🌲 in my backyard. It lay on my garage until a crew from the power company could finally remove it, and another week until crews could restore the lines. It was a miserably hot time, however long it lasted. But inevitable, since we can’t bury power lines, or denude the landscape of trees, or do without electricity. Most of the problem across the city was downed trees, not merely fallen branches; though the latter is sufficient unto the task.

Ice storms and fallen branches taking out power lines is as Texas as flash floods and intolerable heat. That doesn’t make it any better, or more acceptable. I sympathize with the plight of Professor Vladeck, and with his frustration. But these are the conditions that prevail. Austin floods; though not as badly as it used to (they fixed what they could). It also freezes (I can remember the roads out to the Hill Country becoming impassable coated with ice. I lost control of my car once on one of those roads.). And ice storms take down power lines.

In short: shit happens. But Austin is not Texas (geographically, I mean). The article says trees were falling “all over Texas.” Except there aren’t trees all over Texas nor was the freeze statewide. We never got close to freezing here, while north and central Texas were suffering an ice storm. Austin has trees, but nothing like the pines prevalent further east (it would have only been worse, in other words).

What can I say? “Winter was hard.” Not as bad as 2021 (it stayed cold longer, for one thing. This cold snap wasn’t even that unusual.). This power failure is frustrating. They all are. But it has more to do with location and modern life than with the abject failure of the legislatively created power grid that collapsed last winter.

You really can’t compare the two at all, not even in mere chronology.

It's a good question, but it's because when building the New England power grid, engineers knew it had to hold up in really cold weather, which is more expensive to do, but the Texas grid didn't plan for ice storms, and now Republicans refuse to spend money to harden it. https://t.co/nYz0EPnx5F

— 🕷Dante Atkins🕷 (@DanteAtkins) February 4, 2023

Pretty much the same reason Texas shuts down when it snows rather than plow the roads. I lived in southern Illinois literally a mile down the road from the county snowplow barn. They started clearing the roads ASAP because the snow could be thick and long lasting far south of Chicago (we were almost due east of St. Louis).  But snow is seldom thick or long on the ground here. Usually it’s gone in 24 hours. (This winter was an outlier.) Ice storms are even less common, so it’s a question of ROI. Is the expense of a New England quality power line structure truly worth the cost?

We do make our roads out of concrete here, which ice storms can do amazing damage to. But asphalt literally melts in the summer down here, and it’s far more commonly brutally hot than it is seriously cold.

(I forgot to say that during the 2021 storm we lost power AND water. Some pumps froze (here) and then the complete loss of generators shut down the rest. As much as the Texas grid sucks, the two situations are more different than similar.)