Anger mounts in southeast Texas as crippling power outages and heat turn deadly
Anger mounts in southeast Texas as crippling power outages and heat turn deadly
Frustrations are mounting across southeast Texas as residents enter a fourth day of crippling power outages and heat, a combination that has proven dangerous – and at times deadly.
Frustrations are mounting across southeast Texas as residents enter a fourth day of crippling power outages and heat, a combination that has proven dangerous – and at times deadly – as some struggle to access food, gas and medical care.
More than 1.3 million homes and businesses across the region are still without power after Beryl slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 1 hurricane on Monday, leaving at least 11 people dead across Texas and Louisiana.
Many residents are sheltering with friends or family who still have power, but many can’t afford to leave their homes, Houston City Councilman Julian Ramirez told CNN. And while countless families have lost food in their warming fridges, many stores are still closed, leaving government offices, food banks, and other public services scrambling to distribute food to underserved areas, he said.
The cause of the problem is of course gay sex, trans people using bathrooms and a lack of guns and bibles.
As long as bitcoin farms have power, there is no problems
/s
My family is currently blaming Obama. So, there's that.
Ah yes, Obama did climate change. Makes perfect sense.
The Harris County Republican Party criticized CenterPoint in a social media post for its “seemingly lack of preparedness.”
The reason this keeps happening in Texas is republican deregulation though...
They can't keep deregulating if they can't keep blaming the government. And the more they deregulate, the more that goes wrong, the more they can claim the government wasn't prepared for.
It's a bigger economic problem than people are talking about. I have a manager who works from Houston. He can't work right now. Several other coworkers as well.
At some point, employers will have to consider the liability of employing someone in Texas, simply because a power outage could seriously impact them.
So Texas and Florida are out?
Florida, all the craziness aside, is actually part of the national grid and, like the other commenter said, usually rebounds quickly.
Texas OTOH keeps insisting their independent unconnected grid is superior, even though the evidence is stacking quite tall against that claim. If it's not a hurricane, it's the heat. If it's not the heat, it's the cold. If it's not the cold, it's the wind.
It's always SOMETHING with their grid, but I'm sure it has nothing to do with their insistence that their grid be independent. It's all the WoKeNESs that's the problem!!! /s
Yeah, red states are very poor, mostly due to their backwards economic policies. I know someone is going to being up that Texas is actually rich over all, but they still have far worse wealth disparities and widespread poverty than a comparable state like California. So they are indeed still a very poor state.
This poverty is a huge liability. It's all fun and games complaining about how the gov wrecks everything until you need something like well regulated utilities.
Poverty is always a liability. In the healthcare system, poverty raises the costs for everyone else when they don't get things treated or prevented.
What bothers me is that there is a whole bunch of financial types who seem to blissfully ignore liabilities. "Those are unrealized costs," when it should be "those are ticking time bombs." If you don't mitigate liabilities like through well regulated utilities those ticking time bombs will always have bigger consequences when they ARE realized.
The company I work for has a production and shipping facility down near Houston that has been closed down since Monday due to the lack of power. It's insane.
A lot of inertia at the scale of the bulk of the petrochemical industry.
I would not hold my breath. Businesses will simply throw technology at the problem until they can't see it anymore. Was just in a meeting today where the boss was raving about satellite phones solving our connectivity issues.
It sure would be stupid if Texas wasn't connected to the national grid because that would make solving this problem a lot slower and a lot more expensive.
Sure would be stupid...
Don't, Texas is a mess
Did they not listen to the litter campaign?
Remember this at the next elections, when you will have that incredible urge to not vote or to vote right.
Republicans in Texas focus their voter suppression efforts on Houston since it is the biggest Democratic voting population in the State.
Don’t worry. They’ll vote for the same folks who allowed this unpreparedness to continue.
Wow we've done nothing and nothing changed
they most loyal and obedient slaves are the slaves who think they're free
Crazy thought but makes sense. Just thinking of Smithers.
But if we tax rich people to pay for services that's Communism! Also black people would benefit, is that what you want commie?!
Keep voting republican!
/s
Will they get angry enough to do something about the GOPers that are causing the problems? Probably not.
They've been brainwashed into thinking that the GOP is the only solution to their problems and the reason why they never solve the problems is that the enemy is both too strong and too weak.
See point 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism
But not so angry they are going to do something french about it.
IIRC revolts are statistically more likely during heat waves.
Bro if it's triple digits and humid I'm staying my ass inside. Reschedule the revolt to a mild day in the 70s.
A lot of sarcasm here, but I fail to see how deregulation or Texas's separate grid contributed to this problem. I see two main contributing factors:
The storm wasn't projected to hit Houston this hard. The projected track had it making landfall way down the coast in Corpus Christi just 48 hours before, and the day before that it was projected to hit Brownsville, a solid 350 miles away. Houston was not projected to be the target until the last minute, so many people were caught unprepared, including Centerpoint Energy.
Houston's tree canopy is massive. Sure, Houston has a ton of concrete and deforestation, but it remains on the edge of the Piney Woods, and especially in north and east Houston many areas are completely blanketed in hundred foot tall loblolly pines and sweetgums that are prone to breakage in hurricane force winds. Power lines were shredded, and many homes were damaged by falling trees
Except this happens every year, during storms, during heat waves, during cold snaps. If it were just a one-off event it might be able to be waved away, but a pattern of failure is emerging.
Whether the storm was projected to hit as hard or not doesn't really matter, tropical storms and hurricanes are not some new event in that area of Texas, yet the state and local governments seem utterly unprepared. It was only a year or two ago that basically the exact same thing happened, and apparently nothing was done about it to shore up their services. It's an inefficiency of the private sector, they're not capable of providing vital services because their primary motivation is not reliability and efficiency, it's profit and cost cutting.
You don't see this happening in other states with the same frequency. I've never had the grid where I am fail, and we get both extreme heat and cold and occasional tropical storms.
Except this happens every year, during storms, during heat waves, during cold snaps
Does it? We had the snow storm in 2021 that hit the news, but after that, are you lumping every local outage in Texas you see in the news together and blaming the "Texas grid?" People did the same thing when we had a severe ice storm here in Austin in Feb 2023 that knocked out power for several days. Well Austin has a municipal utility because we have not deregulated here, so Austin Energy was responsible for that one, and the problem was ice and trees. People were all over reddit blaming the "Texas grid" at the time, when the issue was ice and trees in a localized area.
Let me be clear I in no way support deregulation. I grew up in Houston when Houston Lighting & Power was our utility, though, and we had outages back then too, because we experience severe weather really often in Houston, and there are a bunch of trees that knock down power lines.
Are you saying you've never lost power to your house? I'm curious where you live where there aren't pretty widespread outages after a hurricane that brings you several hours of 80mph sustained winds. Anyway my entire point was this outage in Houston has nothing to do with the "Texas grid" or deregulation. You could certainly criticize Centerpoint for not being better prepared to repair the outages, but the outages were going to happen regardless
You fail to see it because you are a MAGA toadie.
wow...
How exactly do you "see" these factors, are you sure you're not cognitive dissonancing? Storms change course all the time and those trees have been there for years. Being prepared for the occasional hurricane isn't profitable.
I see a lot of people here blaming the TX grid but not all of Texas is under ERCOT.
SE of Houston, power is supplied by Entergy Texas which also supplies power along most of the gulf coast.
Here is a statement from them, "As of 6:30 p.m. Friday, Entergy Texas crews have safely restored electrical power to approximately 199,100 of the 252,460 customers impacted by Hurricane Beryl. We expect all customers who can safely take power to be restored no later than Monday, July 15."
These are not TX policy decisions causing these outages. It is simply economical decisions that are made throughout the national grid system to make it affordable to deliver the vast quantities of power that people need at a price they can afford. It's simply a fact of life that when you have such a powerful storm passing through, any human built system is going to fall to the power of mother nature.
I was a electrical engineer back in college, so if anyone has any specific things they want to ask, I'll try to respond.
I'm not an economist though so I can't tell you why it's more important for peoples heating and cooling bills to be closer to $100 a month instead of $300 and why the policy decisions are made to support that. And this is with modest electrical usage setting my AC to cool down to a conservative 78-80 degrees since I'm cheap and want to conserve energy.
As a Texan, the problem is we have 0 below ground lines, we don’t stage workers even when we know storms are coming, we don’t require structures to be built in resilient ways (including solar or wind facilities for new builds) and the end result is that our communities aren’t resilient.
Sure we pay less in taxes (note: if you’re wealthy), but you need a generator and an interlock kit to have the electric uptime other places have. You’re still paying a tax to live here, it’s just not going to the government to give you a nicer community, it’s going to businesses so their execs can get wealthier.