The past week in Austin, TX did not leave me with much to learn, or do, but survive.
You may have read a dozen stories about the failure of the Texas power grid. Or you may have been linked to 2011 reports from a previous cold-snap in Texas and wondered why the recommendations weren’t put in place. You may have watched videos of commentators attempting to create a narrative about renewable energy and others debunking it minute by minute. Or maybe you spent your time reading about Rover landing on Mars.
I was freezing.
Not to be dramatic, but I’m going to be dramatic.
I was born in Missouri and spent much of my life dealing with winters, blizzards, and whiteouts. We even had the multi-day ice storm that made it to national news. It was through those experiences that I thought nothing of the weather for Austin; I work from home, so I could avoid the ice, snow, and cold. I’m good.
Wrong.
My electricity and heat first went out Thursday, February 11, and returned the evening of Friday, February 12. Throughout the valentines weekend, the electricity and heat were intermittent. On Monday, February 15, I would awake to a loud thud signaling the shutdown of my HVAC and an eerie silence to fill its space. Over the course of the next several days the interior temperature would drop from 68 to 39 degrees.
The only thing to do was keep calm and ration.
When the spectacle began, I was lucky to recharge and warm-up at a co-workers house that first Friday after my heat first went out. With my existing portable chargers — along with the extra from my co-worker — I would have enough battery to keep my phone charged for emergency communication and for updates across social media.
In the first 30 hours of no electricity and heat, I had filled all bottles, pitchers, and thermoses with water. While the food in my fridge was destroyed, I had plenty of dry-food and pre-made soups to eat that didn’t require heat. This is something I always try to keep stocked and on-hand as a good buffer should something happen.
The days that followed were taxing. The cold was seeping into my bones, and no matter how much I exercised to stay active — as you should in such a situation — I could not shake the cold. Heat from my car melted the frost on my bones. And I soaked in as much warmth as I could, carrying it with me to my blanket-fort for a night’s rest.
The fire alarm that jettisoned me from my bed at 3:30am was of no fun. Dazed and confused, I stumbled my way into the hallway, wondering if I was being poisoned. “There is no heat or gas, we’re electric,” I mumbled to myself while the fire alarm blared. Sleep is what I wanted. I crept back to bed and rejected my earlier assessment; I was being poisoned! I performed a quick symptom check: no headache, dizziness, or stomach cramping. Maybe I wasn’t being poisoned. If not, what was the alarm for? A fire?
The initial confusion had left me and I stumbled to my kitchen table and put in my AirPods and set them to noise cancellation. That helped take the edge off as I pulled on my snow boots, coat, scarfs, gloves, and hat to trek my way to the car, and finding that others were doing the same.
I would later learn that the fire alarm was due to low water pressure. A sprinkler in a ceiling had burst and flooded a few apartments on the other side of me. That was when my water was shutoff.
Each day and each night demanded you to stretch what you had. “Keep the chargers warm, so they can function properly,” I would say to myself. I would use the candles to warm my hands, Huel to skip a meal, nuts for a filling snack, oat milk to conserve water, ice and snow to make water, and the weather app on my phone to track when the sun would come to melt the compacted mush of snow and ice that had formed on the roads.
As the snow melted, I could make a dash from my home to friends to warm, charge, and refill water. When the power came back on Saturday, February 20, there was a sigh of relief. I watched as my thermostat climbed from 39 to 68 for the first time in over a week. I felt the need for fewer layers of clothing. And I relaxed.
By 8:30pm, this night-owl was fast asleep.
This experience isn’t solitary, but it is one of the many who were blessed with luck. I have no water damage. I wasn’t injured slipping on ice. I didn’t have an urgent need to make a dash and crash on the road. I could hunker down and hold out for as long as I can. The only signs of what transpired were two dead plants.
For other Texans, there will be thousands of dollars in repairs bills. Battles with insurance claims to get proper payment for valuables lost and needed repairs. Financial ruin for some. There will be housing insecurity as roofs caved in and food insecurity as food rotted and spoiled. For the last, a drought. No water to drink. No car to retrieve it. No money to buy it. So many had already found a way to survive, and now they are trying to continue to survive — with less.
An off-beat newsletter to be sure, but this is the top of my mind. If you can donate to an organization — money, time, or goods — to assist with the relief efforts of areas impacted by the storm, please consider doing so. I have donated to the Austin Disaster Relief Network and will look to do more.
Originally published in the [Input|Output]s of Mark Newsletter.
