Texapocalypse

The Vikings, in case you did not know this, became Christians kind of late in the game.  Like the 800s to the 1000s, long after most of the rest of Europe had gone Jesus-crazy (except for Lithuania, but I digress).  Part of the reason for this, of course, is that it took a while to establish the trade routes and cultural exchanges that were necessary for Christianity to come along, but another reason is that Vikings, by and large, were doing a great job of taking care of themselves, thank you.  Now, their version of "taking care of themselves" involved raiding coastlines, robbing monasteries and just in general being bad citizens, but they were good at it.  Becoming Christians, of course, meant they'd have to stop doing that stuff and become better neighbors.  So it took a while to catch on.  

Iceland was the last country in northern Europe to embrace Christianity, in the year 999 or 1000, and like everywhere else, Christianity got laid down whole across a pretty well entrenched system of paganism, remnants of which still pop up today.   In Iceland, it's not unusual for road builders to encounter, say, a whitethorn tree, and rather than cut it down, just put the road somewhere else or go around it.  Construction projects sometimes get temporarily halted so that a local shaman can chat with the elves and make sure the project won't disturb them.  Stuff like that.  But if you ask me, Christianity was bound to overtake Viking Paganism sooner or later because Viking Paganism is really a downer.  All the gods eventually get killed or eaten by frost giants or meet other horrible fates, a wolf devours the sun, and then the world ends in a terrible snowstorm that lasts for a year and freezes all the humans to death.  A few of them manage to escape to the world tree, Ygdrasil, and crawl down its branches to start life again, but seriously, that is a bummer of a philosophy. I mean, how would you choose your world to end?  All the dead coming back from their graves to praise the return of Jesus, or freezing to death in a year-long snowstorm? 

Speaking of year-long snowstorms, have you guys been reading the news about Texas lately?

There's a withering irony here because honestly, it wasn't that bad of a snowstorm.  We got maybe six inches, maybe a little more.  Some places got up to a foot, but anybody from Minnesota or North Dakota would just laugh at us if we expressed that this was a lot.  Likewise the temperatures. It got to minus 5 or 6 degrees in places.  North Dakota's annual temperatures typically include at least 50 days below zero. So you would think a few days below zero would not be a big deal. Well, you'd be wrong. Millions of households all over the state were sucking down ridiculous amounts of power just trying to keep their homes warm, Power stations all over the state began freezing over, their generators started flipping off, the whole Texas electricity grid became unstable, and according to the good men of ERCOT, we were "just minutes" from the entire state being plunged into a monthslong blackout due to massive equipment failure.  (Now, I don't know if we can actually believe anything the good men of ERCOT tell us, but that's their story and they're sticking to it.) So ERCOT told the local power gurus (ours is called ONCOR) to start rolling blackouts immediately.

Here's where all hell apparently broke loose.  I used to live in California, and we had rolling blackouts there from time to time, and though they were disruptive, they generally weren't a big deal.  The power would go out for an hour, sometimes a little longer, and then it would come back on.  This would maybe happen a couple of times, the grid would stabilize, and it would be over.  What happened instead was that the blackouts started and didn't roll.  Once you lost power, you lost it, and it didn't come back in an hour, it came back in 80 hours. Maybe.  If you were lucky.  As of late Thursday, which is the most recent update I can get, there were still about 200,000 people without power, and many of them had been without power since Sunday or even earlier. And really, the only reason the situation is sort of stable now is that the temperature's gone up and power demand has dropped.  

By the way, there's a rumor going around that all the wind farm windmills failed, and that was why we had this event.  That is NOT TRUE.  The windmills actually did better under the conditions than they were supposed to, and wind farms in Norway, Iceland and Antarctica do just fine in below-zero conditions every day. The key failure in the Texas system was natural gas.  A lot of Texas's power plants run on natural gas, which is collected at oil wells and piped in.  The problem seems to be both the natural gas wells themselves, which froze, and the connections where the natural gas arrived at the plants. The connections, which let the gas into the plants for the generation of electricity, began to freeze up. When frozen, no natural gas could get through.  If you want to read about this in more depth, check out this article here.  My oil and gas company relatives can probably tell you more about this, as well, so they're cordially invited to fill me in here (I'll publish an update when I can). 

Now, you might think that power plants and natural gas wells should be winterized so that this sort of thing can't happen. Well, yes. You might also think that Texas's electrical grid should be connected to the rest of the country, so when something like this happens, other parts of the grid could help out. Well, yes again. You might also think that when this exact same set of circumstances happened in 2011, the forward-thinking denizens of the State Legislature would have passed some regulations about all this. Well, yes yet again.  Did any of that happen? Nope.  Texas is not fond of passing regulations.  Or mandating winterization of anything.  Or connecting its power grid to the rest of the country, which of course would mean that federal regulations would then apply to it.  Who made these decisions? Well, the fine forward-thinking denizens of the Legislature, naturally.  Am I expecting anything to actually change? Not really.  Why? Well, because this same set of circumstances happened in 2011 and nothing was done then. The only possible reason for anything to change now is international embarrassment.  And I guess that is possible. It could happen.  I'm just not expecting it. 

So how did yours truly and her wife and cats do, while all this was going on?  Well, actually, oddly enough, we were--fine.  Our power went off last Sunday, stayed off for some 4 to 5 hours, and then came back on. (Joan said she heard a loud popping sound right before the power outage, so it very well could have been your typical blown transformer.)  It has been on steadily ever since.  I am not sure why.  In 2011, the last time this happened, we lost power for four days.  Look, my house was built in 1958.  We have overhead power lines. My neighborhood is very working-class Hispanic, and there's no old money anywhere near here.  If there's a power outage in this town, it is pretty certain to find us.  But nothing happened. We had power the whole time.  Our pipes did not freeze.  Our cats did not get indignant and demand to know why we'd turned off the warm.  We never had to light the fireplace (which is good, we haven't lit it since 2011, and I don't even know if it's lightable).  I know not to what to attribute this miracle, except for sheer dumb luck.  

Which isn't to say things have been running smoothly, because they haven't.  We had all kinds of disruptions at my office with the network going up and down, perhaps due to power outages, perhaps due to other things (no one was physically in the building to check).  Colleagues lost power, got it back, lost it again.  ONCOR asked us to conserve energy as much as possible, so we sat in our home office (which doubles as our kitchen) wrapped in blankets, with maybe one light on, and I turned off my second monitor, which really helps me get things done in a more timely manner, because it is a power hog.  We lit a lot of candles rather than use regular lights.  

At one point, I had to go grocery shopping.  This is always interesting because I hate grocery shopping.  Normally we call in our order, then I drive over and they've already got it bagged up for me, so I just put it in the trunk and take it home.  No roving up and down the aisles with a cart and freaking out because there are 47different kinds of penne and I don't know which ones to get and who the hell needs 47 different kinds of penne anyway?  But of course the guys who bag up your order can't get to the store because this is Texas and nobody seems to know how to sand roadways after a snowstorm.  So I had to go to the store. Just backing out of my frozen driveway into the frozen street to drive to the frozen highway to get to the frozen parking lot was an interesting challenge.  Doubly so in that I was wearing vastly oversized galoshes, made to fit Joan, but I was really glad I had them.  And the grocery store looked like locusts had been through it. Especially the produce section, which was basically empty. I had to get creative about most of the items on the list:  "Canned mangoes? None.  Well, there's some canned peaches, those will do.  Soy milk?  None.  Well, there's shelf-storage soy milk in the baking section, that will do."  That sort of thing.  But I was able to fill a cart, and purchase it, and take it home.  I was doing LOTS better than a lot of other people. 

Oh, and by the way, guess what happens when your power is off in subzero temperatures for eighty hours? Pipes freeze and break.  This hasn't happened so much in Dallas, but a lot of the surrounding cities have had a huge problem. A friend of mine's daughter lives in Austin, and her house has no water due to pipe breaks in the area.  She and her kids collected snow in a recycle bin to melt for water.  I mean, that's crazy in a First World country.  But our pipes are fine.  (They run just under the floorboards in an enclosed crawlspace, which could be why? I don't know.)  We kept water trickling the whole time.  And now it's above freezing and nothing's exploded.  Again, I don't know why.  I chart it up once again to sheer dumb luck.  

I don't want to give you the idea that everything is peachy here.  Due to the 2011 goings-on, power outages are an extreme high anxiety event for me, and living under the constant threat of losing power for days at any moment has not been fun. And again, there are lots of people doing lots worse than us all over the state. (If you want to help, these charities are dealing directly with the crisis:  The Austin Area Urban League, the Dallas Housing Crisis Center, and the Red Cross, as well as all these guys.) But we have been incredibly lucky.  Maybe it was all the Lucky Charms that get consumed around here.  Or maybe it's just the fickle finger of fate.  Whatever, I'll take it.  Hope you guys are warm and safe and have water pressure.   Cheers!