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Dispatch from the Deep Freeze
The Great Texan Gridpocalypse, as I lived it.
I know for a lot of you, snow’s probably not novel. It’s winter after all. Hell, growing up in Buffalo I saw my own fair share of it.
I saw a lot of single-digit temperatures in my day, too. I remember on a particular day in Utica — where I lived for a spell in high school — we reached negative 27 Fahrenheit. That’s mighty cold. I moved to Texas in part to escape weather like that.
So while I, like you, thought “well, a couple nights of lows in the single digits and some snow … get some groceries and some wine and hunker down, and maybe prep for some power outages” I was stunned by the sheer lack of empathy, foresight and tactical execution summoned by the powers that be in this here state. Which is to say, in a shorter amount of words: Texas done fucked up on every level imaginable.
Texas literally effortlessly turned a once-in-a-generation storm into a once-in-a-century crisis on top of the once-in-a-century crisis. It was an astonishing dereliction and abdication of societal duty and care, from a state that’s already baked rugged individualism into its brand. This was a magnum opus of deregulation, dysfunction and devastation. This was a man-made disaster in which mother nature merely acted as an accelerant.
