Several factors involved—- the pumping stations lost power so water pressure fell to a trickle. Also homes in Texas are not insulated well-enough to withstand the extreme cold and prolonged lack of heating we experienced.
It was somewhat thermodynamics too— their house was a smaller 1-story house, ours was a larger 2-story house and retained heat long enough to weather the freeze before power came back.
Was super worried after the reports of water supply issues that the pressure would drop and the pipes would freeze while I was sleeping in my 41 degree house :/ Fortunately we are in the lower elevation zone so it never dropped more than a quarter or so(pressure or flow, couldn't tell).
It seems like you lost power around 8 hours and your house didn't lose as much heat as others
I think the fact that this time there is “someone to blame” is really exacerbating the outcry. When a hurricane hits, everyone sort of accepts that Mother Nature is fucking stuff up and rides it out. But this time, everyone seems to be set on being angry at state/city leaders and really wants to make their voices heard.
> Putting aside the power plants (which have been discussed to death), parts of the distribution system were going down all over the place-- lines, transformers, etc. Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts.
That’s true for most of the state, but it is worth noting that in Austin, it wasn’t this. The people you are hearing talking about multi-day blackouts (I was one of them) are likely Austinites where the poor state of the city electrical grid meant that they could not do rolling blackouts. They turned power off for many and just left us in the dark for days. And that’s a whole other issue that needs to be addressed, along with all of the ERCOT issues etc.
I mean, yeah, Mother Nature rode in and fucked things up pretty good. But it’s been known for years both how to prepare for this and that it’s been needed (see the FERC report about 2011). There’s pretty clearly someone to blame, and it’s the grid operators, regulators, and the politicians and voters that enabled them to cut corners this hard.
I think most people are understanding of the fluke weather and wish the infrastructure was better weatherized. The problem is some really horrible leadership at all levels. Austin Energy said the were going to do rolling blackouts, ERCOT told them to shed more power than they anticipated and could not do the blackouts, Austin Energy only communicated this after the fact so no one was able to make preparations for a multi-day blackout. Austin Water saw water demand spike 250% and noticed that their entire reservoir was draining away due to leaks, they put out a boil water notice and then turned off the water 30 minutes later. Like Austin Energy, not giving people a chance to prepare. People are basically begging them to stop putting out vague hopeful statements and give a real assessment of the situation. Also disaster relief has been slow in coming, luckily neighbors have stepped up for each other, but the government getting supplies to the most vulnerable have been terrible. Texas has a disaster every year, it should be good at mobilizing help, but few people were getting the water they needed for their children, insulin, fresh batteries for oxygen pumps or blankets. These are the same supplies that people need during hurricanes so there is really no excuse on why these aren't going out.
I couldn't find specific instances of Texas load shedding devices having issues. However, there were instances of things like circuit breakers failing open in very cold weather. This was probably another cause of these very long outages.
The load shedding requirements were too high to roll the outages. In San Antonio us unlucky lot were just cut off more and more frequently until there was nothing; for days. This was actually confirmed by CPS and ERCOT.
Sounds like you had a charmed disaster; congrats.
When the power failed, neighbors went door-to-door making sure everyone had enough food, water, and blankets. Some people had indoor fires going and invited others to come and stay warm. One neighbor had a backyard pool and he let us come in with buckets and take back some water for flushing toilets.
Putting aside the power plants (which have been discussed to death), parts of the distribution system were going down all over the place-- lines, transformers, etc. Those who reported 24-48 hour outages were probably victims of this rather than the rolling blackouts. Most of the roads were covered with ice on Monday/Tuesday so safe driving was limited to 15mph. This made it hard for repair crews to get to where they were needed.
Grocery stores had lots of empty shelves, but plenty of food, too. Safely driving to one was the hard part. Again, 15mph is pretty much your limit unless your car has AWD, winter tires, etc. I saw some photos showing huge lines to get into stores, and that was misleading-- it's probably just people waiting for the store to open. Store hours were heavily reduced. The store website might say they'll be open 12pm-5pm, but then not actually open until 12:30. When that happens, people would line up and wait (or wait in their cars). With dangerous road conditions keeping non-desperate shoppers away, I never saw the stores get overcrowded.
Overall, things were pretty okay as far as I saw. I feel like some of the media reports were focusing in on the worst of it and gave readers a very wrong impression of how the average Texan was faring. To be fair, though, it would really suck if you broke a leg or otherwise needed medical care on Monday.
[EDIT] Couple things I forgot to mention- There was another neighbor who had a generator that she was using to run an electric heater and heat up a single room in her house. She invited her neighbors to come and spend the night there if anyone was too cold, but power came back before the night came. Also, we had every faucet in the house dripping water-- this was enough to keep the pipes from freezing. I saw some burst pipes spraying water when I was driving on Monday, but they seemed to be in "abandoned" businesses-- some small auto repair shop or something where no one came in on Monday, so the heat was off and the faucets weren't dripping.