Texas

[Nish]

I am glad to hear that you have received your Vermont weather sampler pack. Please remember to cancel your subscription prior to the end of the month if you do not want to be billed.

Seriously though. How are you guys hold in there?

[Hector the Collector]

Hey Nish, I’m in Austin and it has not been good here, for many people. I’m lucky that we only lost power for 14 hrs. Many friends of mine, have been without power, since Monday am. Driving conditions are pretty rough but getting a little better. Roads are all iced up. Some areas now have water issues, like households have no water. Grocery stores have limited hours, with shelves being somewhat bare. Lines to get in, are long. Bottom line, Teas got caught with its pants down. No one expected this. 🙁 It’ll get better, as the weather is to get warmer by the weekend.

[martix_agent]

what needs to be done to make sure this wont happen again? Do you feel its worth the money to do so, seeing how rare it is?

[Hector the Collector]

Not sure what needs to be done. No one thought the power would go out, for this long. This weather doesn’t happen in Texas. It’s a 100 year occasion, hopefully Texas will be more prepared next time around.

[JonM]

I expect that once it does start to warm up down there, the plumbers are going to get a lot of work when the pipes start to thaw.

[wthomas333]

My parents are in Fredericksburg about an hour north of San Antonio. They have been without power for a week now, since last Thursday. And it sounds like it could be awhile before they get it back.
No one has been able to drive anywhere because everything was so iced up. My dad has been running his dialysis machine off a generator. It’s not so much the cold or snow, it’s all the ice that caused limbs and power lines to come down everywhere, including one on top of my mom’s car.
Wish I was there to help, but I’m also glad I decided to stay home with all the kids. I probably would have tried to get down there if my sisters, who live in Austin and Houston, had not also gotten stuck there with them when they went over to visit last Wednesday.

[Hector the Collector]

My prayers are with your parents and your family here in Austin and Houston.

[Menso]

It’s snowing, again, as I post this in San Antonio.

I never thought I’d see the day where I dreaded snow, but that was before I realized yeehaw chucklefucks were in charge of the power grid.

Things have been relatively okay for me, but so many friends and family have been going through the grinder these past few days and I’ve been able to do nothing for them because of the highways being shut down. It sucks.

[Axel]

"yeehaw chucklefucks" lol, have to remember that one

[Magoo]

Yeah, Houston has been rough. Several friends have been without power for a few days. It looks like it's getting sorted, but rolling blackouts are still a thing.

My parents got enough snow in Brenham to collapse their carport. With their cars under it...

I'm in Colorado now, so I myself am out of it. Well, at least our infrastructure can handle the cold, that is. As a Texan, I know how unprecedented this is. And no. Texas won't be revamping their infrastructure. Their heads are up their asses regarding the influx of natural disasters lately. Texas has been consistently reamed since 2017, with Harvey. Now THAT was fun, and the reason I'm in Colorado now...

[flyweightnate]

Seriously though. How are you guys hold in there?

Frankly, we're not.

I was born in Troy, NY and learned to drive there, fortunately. My house, however, was born here. Nobody in the city (Dallas) proper had insulated foundations, and few have insulated walls. It just didn't make sense in the 50s and before. I'm very, very fortunate in that I've had power and gas the whole time. (I live near the police station.) I'm keeping my house at 62 to keep the load off the grid. Space heater in the crawlspace, made mittens out of boot socks for the kids, and have my home office (in the garage) heated via 4x 100W lightbulbs because my space heater is in the crawlspace.

The state, though, is totally shut down. There are only two plows in Dallas, and they won't put salt in the sand "for environmental and corrosion- related reasons" so it's pretty icy. Summer tires are not good, even on a Subaru.

My in-laws have an issue with their water main literally coming in to the house above grade, so it's solid ice. I had ice dams inside all my drain cleanouts. A large number of people have it considerably worse, ruptured pipes in crawlspaces, etc.

The crazy thing is the energy consumption. Demand spiked early last week, but wind and solar started going offline, so natural gas and coal became hot commodities. Now, natural gas is seeing low line pressures after 4-5 days at peak capacity, and a lot of those generation sources iced over this week.

It's like the state forgot to buy life insurance. "We're young, we're wealthy, and it would be a shame to waste all these good people's money on such a freak risk..." Well, whoops.

Really, though, I'm fine, as are about 75% of the people. I'm just cranky because Monday was the last day of my "close contact covid quarantine bonanza!" I was really looking forward to participating in society again!

Hindsight: 2020.

[martix_agent]

Maybe this is a dumb question, but doesn't insulation exist for heat AND cold? I can't even trying to keep my house cool in the summer without insulation.

[flyweightnate]

Yeah, but we're running AC from 100 to 70. People are trying to run heat pumps from -5 to 70. It's a really bad situation.

Oh, and pipes are in crawlspaces, which are outside the air envelope. While the floors are maybe only R3 or R5 equivalent, it means there's no chance enough heat gets into the crawlspace to keep the pipes above 30 if the house is 60 and the ground is 0. In my case, the cleanouts acted as heat sinks with the cold air blowing across them.

[Nish]

I didn't even think of older houses not down there having insulation. I always kind of figured that Insulation would still be a big deal down there to keep the heat out and the AC cost down.

Not using salt makes sense. I can't imagine with the amount of it you guys would use stockpiling it the way we do makes much sense and it's expensive enough we have had big debates about the amount we can afford to use up here.

Solar and wind aren't working all because of ice buildup or they just aren't keeping up?

[bellicose]

We don't salt in Oregon, we use pumice. I hope you guys make it through. We've got a lot of power outages right now as well, but not the crazy cold. At least the mosquitoes won't be as bad this summer for you guys.

[Magoo]

Solar and wind aren't working all because of ice buildup...

Yup, the wind turbines froze up. Because they weren't winterized. I'm hearing attacks against clean energy because of the turbines' failure, but if Antarctica can have wind and solar farms, Texas can too.

[Fubarius]

Heck wind and solar is working just fine up here in the midwest and we've been having lows of -25 for the past few weeks. But we expect that kind of crazy low temps and plan ahead.

[Nish]

Yes we have some wind here in VT though not much, lots of solar. I know they keep it going in winter but I imagine that it just takes a bit of a different setup that wasn't done down there.

[flyweightnate]

Everything's in the same boat - the renewable vs hydrocarbon debate is pretty silly, at least WRT this event. The turbines weren't winterized, and neither were the instruments on the nuclear, gas, and coal plants. Solar... well, hard to get much sun when there's an inch of ice on top. Fact is, gas is over half the generation, so when it got hit, so did the grid. By then, the solar was at 0% and the wind had dropped from 35% to 22%.

What's most interesting is that there simply wasn't enough capacity, period. 50MW is the best we've done all week, and that's not keeping up in a state where most people have (old) heat pumps, not furnaces.

My house was built in 52, typical for anything in the city proper but not downtown (which is typically 1920 or earlier), and seems to have had window units - quite the luxury, I'm sure, if they were original, but that style plug fell out of favor before long. Without A/C, insulation is pretty pointless in the summer. You want that cool evening breeze! The dirt floored, 18" deep, vented crawlspace is another relic - now it means humid air condenses on the cooled joists - but was the standard through the late 70s here. Even with covers on the vents, the T&P valve line iced over at the low point, which is a good 20 feet inside the footprint of the house. That's when I chucked a space heater down there.

I kept my old house as a rental, and had insulated all its walls. The worst it's seen is a frozen spigot outside.

It's wild how much of an impact regional building decisions make on survivability.

[Moodog]

I live next to a technology park and Oncor decided to shut off all of the park's electricity on Monday....and mine along with it. I've had mostly consistent electricity since Tuesday morning though; so I can't complain considering there are many in much worse conditions.

The snow sucks though, keep that shit up North.

[flyweightnate]

You can see where stuff froze Sunday night. Everything that was still working just took a nosedive.