In different areas, power is still out here in North central Texas. Dallas/Ft Worth area. It hasn’t been discriminating, rich and poor alike are hit by it. The affluent area of Southlake had to open a warming station. All hotel rooms sold out. My friends, a family recovering from Covid, didn’t have electricity to run the husband’s breath…
In different areas, power is still out here in North central Texas. Dallas/Ft Worth area. It hasn’t been discriminating, rich and poor alike are hit by it. The affluent area of Southlake had to open a warming station. All hotel rooms sold out. My friends, a family recovering from Covid, didn’t have electricity to run the husband’s breathing treatments. They did get a hotel room.
There are people on Facebook saying this is all Biden’s fault. Because he’s proposed alternative energy to the beloved oil. But the council , ERCOT, formed to prevent this said they weren’t given the funds needed to fix these problems from Gov. Abbott. The energy company Oncor says as areas get back online they’ll start rolling blackouts again!
So many thanks to Biden! For being a president! No thanks to Abbott who continues to play the party politics.
Thanks for the summary, Heather! News here is all about the weather! ❄️
I'm in rural Texas about 70 miles northwest of San Antonio. It is 7 degrees right now and expected to go down to 4 degrees. Our rural electric cooperative seems to be doing an amazing job of keeping the electricity on. We've had a few flickers but no outages for which I am very grateful. The one thing I haven't heard anyone say to day is this storm which is setting records would seem to me to be part of the climate crisis. Global warming means storms become more and more intense and larger. We should be talking about the climate crisis while the weather has our attention. In my twenty years in Texas I'm never seen but a dusting of snow that melted almost as soon as it touched the ground. Now we have about three inches of snow which won't get a chance to melt for several more days. And we had an ice storm that has covered the trees with about 1/2 inch of ice around the branches and two inch icicles hanging on each and every leaf. The sparkle of the ice was beautiful in the sunshine this afternoon but this is very hard on the trees. Even when I lived in New England I remember some ice storms but never one that created so much ice on the trees. Let's start talking about the climate crisis!
My friends from that area of the country are braying about how Global Warming is being disproven by the situation of today, because it is really cold. What maroons, to quote the philosopher of my childhood, Bugs Bunny.
Yup! I hear that all the time too. They don’t read or choose to inform themselves about why these extremes are happening. As you kindly put it, what maroons. And we are stuck living with such idiots. Mother Earth has every right to kick us off.
Ice storms are more the norm for Ft Worth. It’s definitely extreme that it’s cold all the way to Galveston! I do remember snow here as a kid that would last a day or two every few years. But a week? Still I have relatives that think this is all just nature’s way and global warming isn’t real. Maybe nature’s way of getting rid of humans!
I don’t understand why some people jump right to “blame” when something bad happens. How is this in any way Biden’s fault?!?!? And more importantly, why even try to blame the effects of a major weather event on a person unless the ultimate desired outcome is to fuel hatred and division. Then that begs the question- why are so many people so eager to promote hatred and division?? I just don’t get it 😢.
The distinction between blame and responsibility is an interesting one. I've seen blame be integral to abuse. It directs a lot of hostility at pushing its target down relative to the blamer. Caught up in that hostility is the energy that could have been used to address whatever the problem might be.
The last 40 years of radical right "conservatism" has made extensive use of that pattern. Drain resources toward the rich, then harness the frustration over lack of resources to demonize the Dems and get votes from the very people being harmed. The disgraced former president extended the practise to a virtual art form, collecting money from his voters based on his big lie that they were aggrieved and helpless while he shafted them along with everyone else.
You make a very compelling point. I have not been able to wrap my mind around the fact that the very people who suffer the most under republican leadership are the ones who continue to vote them in to power.
And this is the problem, in a nutshell. No matter what the reality is... if people are already indoctrinated to find fault with their perceived enemy (President Biden in this case) and they blame him, EVEN as that person works to help him, it seems as if there is no way to reach them. It’s incredibly frustrating.
Points to the need for the Democratic Party and the Biden administration to aggressively publicize all the things they do that make people's lives better -- and what the Repubicans do to try to prevent that.
Because their N°1 principle is that it can't be their fault....therefore it is someone else's. It's a lot easier to moan than to get yourself off your backside and get the problem fixed.....and in this case it sounds like underinvestment in the electrical distribution system and poor management of the maintenance and repair services.......a local affair!
Isn't it fascinating that they don't want the federal gubbament messing with their sovereignty, stay out of state affairs and block aid to local/state governments!! But as soon as a crisis hits their state it's all the FEDS FAULT for not jumping in to help them.
Agree. With events like this one, I tend to cancel out all the chatter and cacophony and turn immediately to this issue: power grids are very outdated forms of electricity; TX and other ‘sunny’ states should already be converting to solar power; climate change. These are the current issues. What am I doing in my life to address these and how may I support the hardest hit parts of America right now?
It does me know good, or solving the issue really, to blog are argue in real life with people about party politics, POTUS, etc etc.
Hmmm, more and more extreme weather events .... Maybe it has something to do with climate disruption. and maybe we should tackle it properly. For now nonpartisan assistance to Americans is the right move by the Biden admin.
And if it stays cold, swinging along to Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys always heats things up. Aaah-HAAAH!!!
"Everbody complaining about the weather but nobody doing anything about it" is an old way of thinking. We can deal with climate change resulting in historically unusual weather by reducing fossil fuel usage as a start and it has to be on a world-wide basis. Rejoining the Paris accords is good.
Thanks, Denise, for keeping us informed. I was struck by the news that Texas was experiencing sub-freezing temps. To me that's what makes power outages so frightening.
I haven’t been struck by the rolling power outage. But yes! 1 degree right now. Yikes! Snow all the way to the beaches of The Gulf. Freezing ice/sleet/snow predicted for Tuesday night. Every county affected.
Schools had to give up on remote learning since power has been out. Don’t mess with Snow Days! Nature will find a way to make it happen!
Same as last year, being isolated doesn’t really change my lifestyle all that much. Thanks! I’m good! Me and my pets! 😊
We didn't fare so well in the greater Houston area. 12+ hours without power today - it got down to 44 in our house. Worse for many households in Houston proper. Truly a disaster.
Thanks for the well-wishes! We are warm at the moment. I’m sure our house would have been in the 30’s by morning if our power hadn’t come back up shortly before midnight.
Several areas came back up and went back down. People without heat are saying their house is in the 30s today. It is a huge disaster. The news report said ERCOT tried to pull Texas off the national grid so we don’t have any support system. They have failed epically! Stay Safe!
The high today here in central Texas was 21 degrees and the low is going to be about 4 degrees. Tomorrow will be better. The low predicted to be 23 degrees will be higher than today's high at 21 degrees. Rather twists the mind's logic, doesn't it.
Welcome to New England! Although it’s warmer in Boston this week than Texas. Sorry to you all. We expect that type of weather and are insulated against it.
Virginia, where I live, has its share of power outages, and has experienced single digits and even negative digits on occasion. A sure-fire way to prevent that (while we're waiting for a climate change correction) is to invest in a whole-house generator. After experiencing a six-day outage some years ago, we finally bought one. Since then our outages have been reduced to momentary blips, the longest having lasted an hour.
We bought a small generator after the derecho tore through the mid-Atlantic, leaving us without power. It will hold us long enough to transfer everything to family with a whole house generator, in case of major long-term winter outages.
I have family and friends in DFW. Some have heat, some don't. It's frightening. What I don't understand is how a power grid that can handle Texas summers can't handle a few days of freezing cold. WTF?
That's what I assumed -- that's how it happens here in Connecticut-- but I hadn't read anything in the local or national news explaining that. The rolling blackouts make it sound like the utility companies are doing this arbitrarily.
A friend down in Rockport has been without power during the entire time and they are not expecting to have any power for several more days. The town is almost out of gas. He is in a motel where there are only three people remaining; it is 40 degrees inside and they just got water back this morning.
That is probably due to transformers, which are above ground, being damaged. Most homes in our area have underground utilities, but ours are above ground because the builder would have been forced to blast through solid granite, at huge expense, in order to bury them. We've had neighbors' homes with underground utilities lose power while we kept ours, and it was due to their houses being serviced by different transformers from ours, and ours dodged the bullet.
Placing power and phone lines underground is a sensible precaution to ward off disaster. But the greater expense is an incentive to cut costs. leaving people vulnerable as in TX right now.
I have memories of ice similar storms in Montréal which was supplied by only three major high tension lines from Hydro sources in the north. Ice builds up, breaks the line in remote forest areas. When you only have 3 sources, losing one is difficult...but when 2 or more go down, you're in real trouble. Blackouts don't always have such happy outcomes as the rise in the birth-rate 9 months after the fabled black out of New York State a generation ago.......got to keep warm somehow!
I'm one of the lucky people who still has power (it was a whopping 14F degrees in Austin earlier and is 20F as I write this). I just received an email from the gas company, stating that some of the storage gas wells are freezing and there is now a possibility of a shortage. I do have a small space heater, but not many people have those on hand, and if there is no gas, then we're without heat and hot water.
Beginning Saturday, the night temperatures will remain above freezing, so that will help, but wow. This weather extends to the Gulf, and the beaches of Galveston are covered in ice and snow. Crazy weather!
In different areas, power is still out here in North central Texas. Dallas/Ft Worth area. It hasn’t been discriminating, rich and poor alike are hit by it. The affluent area of Southlake had to open a warming station. All hotel rooms sold out. My friends, a family recovering from Covid, didn’t have electricity to run the husband’s breathing treatments. They did get a hotel room.
There are people on Facebook saying this is all Biden’s fault. Because he’s proposed alternative energy to the beloved oil. But the council , ERCOT, formed to prevent this said they weren’t given the funds needed to fix these problems from Gov. Abbott. The energy company Oncor says as areas get back online they’ll start rolling blackouts again!
So many thanks to Biden! For being a president! No thanks to Abbott who continues to play the party politics.
Thanks for the summary, Heather! News here is all about the weather! ❄️
I'm in rural Texas about 70 miles northwest of San Antonio. It is 7 degrees right now and expected to go down to 4 degrees. Our rural electric cooperative seems to be doing an amazing job of keeping the electricity on. We've had a few flickers but no outages for which I am very grateful. The one thing I haven't heard anyone say to day is this storm which is setting records would seem to me to be part of the climate crisis. Global warming means storms become more and more intense and larger. We should be talking about the climate crisis while the weather has our attention. In my twenty years in Texas I'm never seen but a dusting of snow that melted almost as soon as it touched the ground. Now we have about three inches of snow which won't get a chance to melt for several more days. And we had an ice storm that has covered the trees with about 1/2 inch of ice around the branches and two inch icicles hanging on each and every leaf. The sparkle of the ice was beautiful in the sunshine this afternoon but this is very hard on the trees. Even when I lived in New England I remember some ice storms but never one that created so much ice on the trees. Let's start talking about the climate crisis!
My friends from that area of the country are braying about how Global Warming is being disproven by the situation of today, because it is really cold. What maroons, to quote the philosopher of my childhood, Bugs Bunny.
Yup! I hear that all the time too. They don’t read or choose to inform themselves about why these extremes are happening. As you kindly put it, what maroons. And we are stuck living with such idiots. Mother Earth has every right to kick us off.
Exactly - "How can global warming cause freezing cold, silly!" Maroons for sure.
Ice storms are more the norm for Ft Worth. It’s definitely extreme that it’s cold all the way to Galveston! I do remember snow here as a kid that would last a day or two every few years. But a week? Still I have relatives that think this is all just nature’s way and global warming isn’t real. Maybe nature’s way of getting rid of humans!
Exactly. See my comment up thread.
I don’t understand why some people jump right to “blame” when something bad happens. How is this in any way Biden’s fault?!?!? And more importantly, why even try to blame the effects of a major weather event on a person unless the ultimate desired outcome is to fuel hatred and division. Then that begs the question- why are so many people so eager to promote hatred and division?? I just don’t get it 😢.
The distinction between blame and responsibility is an interesting one. I've seen blame be integral to abuse. It directs a lot of hostility at pushing its target down relative to the blamer. Caught up in that hostility is the energy that could have been used to address whatever the problem might be.
The last 40 years of radical right "conservatism" has made extensive use of that pattern. Drain resources toward the rich, then harness the frustration over lack of resources to demonize the Dems and get votes from the very people being harmed. The disgraced former president extended the practise to a virtual art form, collecting money from his voters based on his big lie that they were aggrieved and helpless while he shafted them along with everyone else.
You make a very compelling point. I have not been able to wrap my mind around the fact that the very people who suffer the most under republican leadership are the ones who continue to vote them in to power.
There 'tis in a nurshell. We the People, All of Us This Tme, have so much work to do.
WTPAOUTT
Great phrase
And this is the problem, in a nutshell. No matter what the reality is... if people are already indoctrinated to find fault with their perceived enemy (President Biden in this case) and they blame him, EVEN as that person works to help him, it seems as if there is no way to reach them. It’s incredibly frustrating.
Points to the need for the Democratic Party and the Biden administration to aggressively publicize all the things they do that make people's lives better -- and what the Repubicans do to try to prevent that.
YES!
Because their N°1 principle is that it can't be their fault....therefore it is someone else's. It's a lot easier to moan than to get yourself off your backside and get the problem fixed.....and in this case it sounds like underinvestment in the electrical distribution system and poor management of the maintenance and repair services.......a local affair!
Isn't it fascinating that they don't want the federal gubbament messing with their sovereignty, stay out of state affairs and block aid to local/state governments!! But as soon as a crisis hits their state it's all the FEDS FAULT for not jumping in to help them.
Not much you can do with bad faith.
And yet they blame Biden, who is providing aid. The madness continues.
Agree. With events like this one, I tend to cancel out all the chatter and cacophony and turn immediately to this issue: power grids are very outdated forms of electricity; TX and other ‘sunny’ states should already be converting to solar power; climate change. These are the current issues. What am I doing in my life to address these and how may I support the hardest hit parts of America right now?
It does me know good, or solving the issue really, to blog are argue in real life with people about party politics, POTUS, etc etc.
When ya got nothin' practical or helpful, blame's the only game.
Stay safe and warm, Denise. I'm sorry Texas is in such a terrible situation right now.
Thanks! So far I’m pretty toasty so far!
Hmmm, more and more extreme weather events .... Maybe it has something to do with climate disruption. and maybe we should tackle it properly. For now nonpartisan assistance to Americans is the right move by the Biden admin.
And if it stays cold, swinging along to Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys always heats things up. Aaah-HAAAH!!!
"Everbody complaining about the weather but nobody doing anything about it" is an old way of thinking. We can deal with climate change resulting in historically unusual weather by reducing fossil fuel usage as a start and it has to be on a world-wide basis. Rejoining the Paris accords is good.
Or Asleep at the Wheel!
Oh yeah
Thanks, Denise, for keeping us informed. I was struck by the news that Texas was experiencing sub-freezing temps. To me that's what makes power outages so frightening.
Hoping for the best for you in the coming days.
I haven’t been struck by the rolling power outage. But yes! 1 degree right now. Yikes! Snow all the way to the beaches of The Gulf. Freezing ice/sleet/snow predicted for Tuesday night. Every county affected.
Schools had to give up on remote learning since power has been out. Don’t mess with Snow Days! Nature will find a way to make it happen!
Same as last year, being isolated doesn’t really change my lifestyle all that much. Thanks! I’m good! Me and my pets! 😊
We didn't fare so well in the greater Houston area. 12+ hours without power today - it got down to 44 in our house. Worse for many households in Houston proper. Truly a disaster.
Take care Judy! And be safe!
Thanks for the well-wishes! We are warm at the moment. I’m sure our house would have been in the 30’s by morning if our power hadn’t come back up shortly before midnight.
That's a relief!
I hope you and yours are not suffering!
Several areas came back up and went back down. People without heat are saying their house is in the 30s today. It is a huge disaster. The news report said ERCOT tried to pull Texas off the national grid so we don’t have any support system. They have failed epically! Stay Safe!
Good to hear, Denise!
The high today here in central Texas was 21 degrees and the low is going to be about 4 degrees. Tomorrow will be better. The low predicted to be 23 degrees will be higher than today's high at 21 degrees. Rather twists the mind's logic, doesn't it.
Welcome to New England! Although it’s warmer in Boston this week than Texas. Sorry to you all. We expect that type of weather and are insulated against it.
Virginia, where I live, has its share of power outages, and has experienced single digits and even negative digits on occasion. A sure-fire way to prevent that (while we're waiting for a climate change correction) is to invest in a whole-house generator. After experiencing a six-day outage some years ago, we finally bought one. Since then our outages have been reduced to momentary blips, the longest having lasted an hour.
Part of the problem in OK is that gas pipes are freezing, cutting off supply and raising rates to as high as they can legally go.
We bought a small generator after the derecho tore through the mid-Atlantic, leaving us without power. It will hold us long enough to transfer everything to family with a whole house generator, in case of major long-term winter outages.
International Falls MN is temporarily located in TX this week.
Wood stove here in Michigan. And long underwear. Wishing you sunshine and warmth.
What a great way for the people in Texas to start to understand CLIMATE CHANGE! If they can stop blaming Biden who has been in office a mirror month!!
I have family and friends in DFW. Some have heat, some don't. It's frightening. What I don't understand is how a power grid that can handle Texas summers can't handle a few days of freezing cold. WTF?
I just read a story that stated the generating equipment is literally shutting itself down because of the extreme cold. https://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/news/2021/02/15/dallas-winter-storm-freeze.html
That's what I assumed -- that's how it happens here in Connecticut-- but I hadn't read anything in the local or national news explaining that. The rolling blackouts make it sound like the utility companies are doing this arbitrarily.
It's a question of "load mnagement"....shring out a reduced power level so everyone gets a bit.
If I understand the theory of rolling blackouts - I may be wrong - the goal is to reduce excess demand in a way that equalizes the harm over time.
Yes, but some friends report no rolling at all, just hours and hours of blackout.
A friend down in Rockport has been without power during the entire time and they are not expecting to have any power for several more days. The town is almost out of gas. He is in a motel where there are only three people remaining; it is 40 degrees inside and they just got water back this morning.
Also, a friend who lives in a relatively new community outside Dallas where the power lines are underground, is still suffering blackouts.
really. I was just wondering about underground lines. But I guess they still connect somewhere and transformers are going out so all power goes down.
That is probably due to transformers, which are above ground, being damaged. Most homes in our area have underground utilities, but ours are above ground because the builder would have been forced to blast through solid granite, at huge expense, in order to bury them. We've had neighbors' homes with underground utilities lose power while we kept ours, and it was due to their houses being serviced by different transformers from ours, and ours dodged the bullet.
Also, the generators are apparently shutting themselves down. They are not sufficiently insulated, I guess. https://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/news/2021/02/15/dallas-winter-storm-freeze.html
Placing power and phone lines underground is a sensible precaution to ward off disaster. But the greater expense is an incentive to cut costs. leaving people vulnerable as in TX right now.
I have memories of ice similar storms in Montréal which was supplied by only three major high tension lines from Hydro sources in the north. Ice builds up, breaks the line in remote forest areas. When you only have 3 sources, losing one is difficult...but when 2 or more go down, you're in real trouble. Blackouts don't always have such happy outcomes as the rise in the birth-rate 9 months after the fabled black out of New York State a generation ago.......got to keep warm somehow!
It's my understanding that heating in Quebec is mostly electric because of the availability of hydro power. So power outages would be severe/
I'm one of the lucky people who still has power (it was a whopping 14F degrees in Austin earlier and is 20F as I write this). I just received an email from the gas company, stating that some of the storage gas wells are freezing and there is now a possibility of a shortage. I do have a small space heater, but not many people have those on hand, and if there is no gas, then we're without heat and hot water.
Beginning Saturday, the night temperatures will remain above freezing, so that will help, but wow. This weather extends to the Gulf, and the beaches of Galveston are covered in ice and snow. Crazy weather!