Wearing two layers of shirts, jackets, and pants underneath layers of blankets, Jerome Marshall, 33, went to sleep in his Texas home last Monday and waited for the power to turn back on. When he woke up the next morning, the thermostat inside his home read 32 degrees, and there was no indication that the power would be back on soon.
That same day, Ted Gamby left his home in University Park in search of gas to power generators at his home and the home of his in-laws. He put his credit card into the gas pump over and over again, but it wouldn’t take. The power had been shut off at the station, and the pumps were frozen.
Texas isn’t built for this sort of arctic blast, and Texans are bearing the brunt.
The record-breaking freeze affected large swaths of the state, from the tip of the Panhandle all the way to the Rio Grande Valley, leading to a massive spike in demand for electricity. The state’s power grid couldn’t handle it: Power plants and wind turbines froze, and there was not enough natural gas to power every part of the state. So, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas was forced to order temporary blackouts to conserve energy. The outages were initially expected to be brief, for maybe 15 to 20 minutes.
But the power never turned back on. As of Thursday morning, power was down for fewer than 500,000 Texas customers, a big improvement from Wednesday morning, when 2.7 million homes throughout the state were without heat and electricity. Many families also had to go without water as their pipes froze. Texans rushed to grocery stores to stock up on pantry goods; others brought home charcoal and propane and fired up the grill. Cities set up heating centers for vulnerable residents, while Texans in rural areas brought their farm animals into their homes to keep them from freezing.
Texas’s government said on Wednesday that it hoped to have the power back on by Thursday. But there’s only one question Texans have right now: Why wasn’t the state prepared for this? This is the third winter-induced power outage that the state has experienced over the past decade. Surely, the state’s energy providers should have known what to expect.
Apparently not.
“Every summer, we deal with multiple days of 100-plus temps in a row,” Austin resident Adria Johnson told NBC News. “Who would have guessed we couldn’t handle a couple days of freezing temperatures?”
