The Texas power outage is a nation-wide problem
Texan here, living in a suburb of Houston. This was a really unique week, but not <i>that</i> bad I think. Everything was totally covered in snow Monday through Wednesday, which was super-weird for Texas. My power was only out on Wednesday, 9am-6pm precisely. Pretty sure it was a rolling outage because it died and came back on the hour. Our water comes from a neighborhood well shared by about 10 houses here. That means when we lose power, the pump stops and we have no water. Our heating is natural gas, but lack of electricity to run the fan motors means no heat.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;Tuesday so safe driving was limited to 15mph. This made it hard for repair crews to get to where they were needed.<p>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&#x27;s probably just people waiting for the store to open. Store hours were heavily reduced. The store website might say they&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>[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 &quot;abandoned&quot; businesses-- some small auto repair shop or something where no one came in on Monday, so the heat was off and the faucets weren&#x27;t dripping.