Keep Austin Wired

How we survived the deep freeze in Austin

It had been freezing for days. Annie stocked up on groceries, made sure the pipes were running, covered her plants, and generally did a better job preparing than I did. After all, I figured, I dealt with the winter of 2010-11 in Cambridge, when the ice from the second week of October didn’t melt until after the last snows in April. I didn’t deal with it particularly well, but I did, technically, deal with it.

The power went off at 2 a.m. on Monday and, since we were sleeping in for the holiday, it wasn’t until about 10 that realized it. Annie immediately emptied the fridge into the snow outside. I thought she was overreacting and we would be putting it all back in by noon.

There was a lot of snow - not the thin layer of sleet of even our whitest Winter days. This had powder and layers. I was concerned with the roads being impassable for a few days; that was what they had warned us about. We knew it was going to be colder for longer than normal, not that it would be a cataclysm involving power and water.

Monday was actually pretty fun. We had enough water in the tank for one shower, so we played in the snow with the rest of the neighborhood for a few hours knowing we would be able to get warm and clean again. Some cars were moving around the neighborhood, but the roads were essentially just for sledding. We live at the top of a very steep hill. Kids and adults were out with inner tubes and makeshift sleds of different levels of success. A few folks showed up with snowboards and skis. Some enterprising teenagers made a ski jump into one of the snow banks that had accumulated at the base of the hill. We used our sit-on-top kayak, which amazingly did not injure me or anyone in my path. It was a pain to haul back up the hill. Our across-the-street neighbors went down three at a time while I gave them a ‘feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme’ push.

We share a roof deck with our duplex neighbor. Annie made a world-class snowman. The 60-year-old duplexmate Keith and I rained snowballs down mercilessly onto the sledders.

Around 4 that afternoon I started to get worried. Our house is old and poorly insulated. We bundled into the upper floor with our dog and our cat under the covers. They normally don’t get along.

When there is no power and a ton of snow, it gets very dark and very quiet. I am used to the sounds of traffic around us and the general ambient sound of the city. In Corsicana, the noise of crickets, trains, or cars speeding up and down the country road near our house were the backing track of the night. This Robert Frost nonsense was spooky.

The next morning, we knew we were in trouble. The house was under 30 degrees. There was ice in the bottom of the showers.  Fortunately, Annie’s sister Averi lived relatively nearby in a small pocket of about 10 houses that had retained power. We think that it is because it is near a railroad control station.

Annie’s SUV was able to make the trip. Then there were three humans, two dogs, and two cats in the small two-bedroom apartment. We hunkered down, watched movies, monitored the weather, and read. It was then that we started learning about the ERCOT failure, watched with disgust and anger as former Governor of Texas and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said that people would rather be freezing than have a connected grid and as Governor Abbott went on Fox News to blame the Green New Deal with a lie about frozen renewables. (They did underperform, but it was a much smaller fraction contributing to the grid.)

That anger was palpable. Meteorologists had more warning for this than for hurricanes. We could have bought propane stoves, consolidated into homes with gas burners, and found more non-perishable food.

On Wednesday, I got a text from a childhood friend who lives alone, Hunter, that he was “cold and hungry.” Fortunately, he was relatively close, too. We mapped a route with few hills and Annie got us there safely. Hunter had his ancient boxer. So now there were 4 adults and 5 animals in the apartment.

What would have happened if the phone networks had failed?

Reddit - not the newspaper nor the officials - had the most up-to-date information.

All of that day, the water pressure was slowly dropping. We filled up pots, pans, the bathtub, anything we could find. Then they announced the boil-water notice. We knew how lucky we were - most people in our town had no way to boil water and no water to boil.

On Thursday, our power had returned but the water had not. We returned home with Hunter, who was still out of power. We only had the most critical things plugged in and gathered snow to boil and use for flushing the toilet.

That day Ted Cruz did a huge service to the State of Texas by enabling us to be heated from the inside by our fiery rage of ten-thousand suns.

On Friday, we returned Hunter to his home, where his power had come back. He got his water back before we did. By Sunday, it reached the 70s. We cleared out the damaged and dead trees - a branch had come down inches from our Keith’s car.

It is Monday, and they just lifted the boil-water notice. I just drove across town to get my second Covid vaccine shot. There are road crews and water workers everywhere. The roads are packed and the drivers even more erratic than normal.

We will be talking about how it all happened and what it all means for years, but I can only imagine how awful this last week was for the millions of my compatriots who did not get so lucky.