Here’s the thing: I love the snow. Being from the Midwest, snow is a fact of life for a quarter of the year or more. My mom likes to tell the story that the day I was born (Nov. 5) was the first day of snow in our town that year. I grew up with snowmen and snowball fights and snow days and loved it. You might think that moving to Austin was a poor choice if I loved the snow so much - but hey, the snow came to me this year!
And it was a disaster.
Gallons of ink have been spilled about the striking-even-by-Texas-standards lack of preparedness and faith in the free market that led to the catastrophic failure of our power generation capacity, which led to millions of Texans going without power for days, which led to dozens of deaths across the state (at last count I saw 80, though the real toll is likely far larger), water system failures (Austin was under a boil notice until yesterday!), grocery store and gas shortages, massive pollution events, and more. For anyone interested in a good roundup of why the power system failed so badly in the state, David Roberts has a great piece on his Substack explaining it from 30,000 feet.
So I won’t rehash the cascading failures that led to such a miserable week for so many in this space. Instead, I think it will be more interesting to share my experience of the storm and its aftermath.
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I woke up on Monday, Feb. 15 to four inches of dry, powdery snow and air temps of 10F. Perfect skiing snow, if we had any elevation to speak of (although these blokes gave it their best shot!). My partner, Kenna, and I did our best to convince our dog that, actually, the world hadn’t ended and that snow was fun. She wasn’t having it. We walked mostly on the street, which was unplowed and would remain snow-covered for five more days. Juno got over herself eventually.
The school district had planned months ago for Feb. 15 to be a staff development day, a day off for students. Our principal emailed at 8:30 cancelling the scheduled trainings, and instead we were asked to come to a Zoom staff meeting an hour later. In this meeting, I realized that many of my colleagues lost power around 2:00 am that morning. We had been told to expect rolling blackouts, but of the 40ish staff members who had lost power, none had gotten it turned back on. This was my first glimpse into how bad the situation in Texas was about to become.
Several of my colleagues ended up going four or five days without power. Their homes reached temperatures in the 30s F. They set up tents and sleeping bags in their living rooms, or braved the unpaved roads to stay with friends.
My idyllic snow morning was tempered by my understanding that, having power and heat, I was one of the lucky ones.
An email notice came later that day that classes would be cancelled on Tuesday and Wednesday. Then, another notice came that cancelled classes for the rest of the week. Finally, the first two days of this week were cancelled - today, Feb. 24, was my first day teaching since Feb. 11, nearly two full weeks ago.
More notifications came in, this time from the City of Austin. They implored residents who had power to conserve energy. We set our thermostat to 60F and bundled up in sweaters and blankets. We were also told to drip our faucets to prevent freezing pipes. Living in an interior rowhouse with insulating neighbors on either side of us, we were lucky not to have to worry as much about freezing pipes—though I did have to defrost our outdoor spigots.
As Monday bled drearily into Tuesday, the scale of the destruction in Texas was becoming clearer. Temperatures were still 40+ degrees lower than seasonal averages. This meant that what was frozen remained frozen, including residential water pipes, South Texas citrus trees, and of course natural gas power plants. Nobody was getting power back - if anything more homes were being shut off. Power was maintained to grids connected to “critical infrastructure,” and beyond that there was no capacity to turn the power back on. By sheer luck, we live in the same neighborhood as a children’s hospital, and presumably share a power grid.
Out of all 33 H-E-B grocery stores in the Austin area, only one opened that Tuesday. Coincidentally, it was the one within a ten minute walk from our house. We had plenty of food, but we were running low on staples like milk and flour, and a neighbor was really running low on food so we offered to buy her a few things. Kenna and I bundled up, borrowed a stroller from a neighbor to load groceries onto, and trundled across increasingly hard-packed, icy sidewalks to wait in line as the store opened. Forty minutes later, as we approached the front of the store, we realized that the line curved back around the store before reapproaching the entrance - likely another hour wait. We cut our losses and walked home.
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Staying home and staying warm was growing boring. Or perhaps more truthfully, staying home and staying warm was becoming intolerably guilt-inducing. As the depth of crisis intensified, Kenna and I both felt compelled to help. We had the time, we had the relative personal comfort - and the situation in Austin was dire.
So I signed up for a volunteer shift at a warming center in north Austin. When I arrived at 7:00 am on Wednesday, the high school theater housing 30 displaced people had no power. The site coordinators, from the Red Cross and the Austin Disaster Relief Network, were busy working out transportation and a new site. We were eventually given a city bus with an escort, to ameliorate the hazard of driving—the remaining snow had gotten another 1/4-inch layer of freezing rain overnight, leaving slick, icy roads. In the meantime, I helped make breakfast in the dark high school cafeteria—luckily, the gas range still worked and I had thought to bring a headlamp. After serving a breakfast of scrambled eggs and avocado, I helped load everyone onto the bus and drove to the new site.
As we came quickly to find out, the new site, a middle school a mile up the road, lacked running water. At this point, we didn’t know whether that was due to frozen pipes or a problem with the city water system. It did leave us with the unwelcome task of finding a new site and transporting everyone again.
Around noon, we finally managed to get everyone to a church basement near downtown. The only problem was, there was no food. Kenna posted on our neighborhood Facebook page that we needed food for a shelter. An hour later, we had driven to fifteen houses, picking up food that strangers had left outside. We dropped the food off at the shelter and called it a day.
This episode highlights the disorganized, ad hoc city response to the storm and ensuing crisis. It also highlights who exactly showed up for Austinites - mutual aid networks, religious institutions, and random folks who sacrificed for their neighbors.
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On Thursday and Friday, Kenna and I went downtown to help at the Palmer Events Center. Our friend Zach, itching to help, came on Friday as well. This was the main shelter for displaced people in Austin, and when we were there they were at full capacity - 500 cots. (As of this writing, there are still people sheltering there.) We were thrown right in to help on the upper floor. This area was reserved for families with young children, seniors, and those with special medical needs. We spent the morning distributing breakfasts (croissants and fruit cups) and water, checking on people, and scrambling to find, say, a can opener for baby formula, or any hot beverages (these remained elusive). The pace was relentless. I didn’t sit down once during the five hours I was there on the first day.
On Friday, the shelter had begun to clear out. ERCOT announced early Friday morning that municipal power providers no longer had to restrict electricity usage. Most of Austin’s homes regained power. Many displaced people had learned that their apartments had regained electricity, and the city had repurposed the buses to transport people from the shelters back home. The lower floor, which was mostly single adults, many of whom were experiencing homelessness, was emptying too, although more slowly. It warmed to about 40F on Friday, enough to melt much of the remaining snow on the roads but still cold enough that sleeping outside was not an option.
Our job Friday, along with providing service (helping people to the bathroom, playing with cooped-up young children, etc.), was to clean, break down, and stack cots as people left the shelter. I helped families pack up their belongings and arrange transportation. For those who weren’t lucky enough to be heading home, I spent some time talking with them, just trying to make a human connection in a desperate situation. Then, exhausted, we went home.
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Saturday saw warmer temperatures; we hit near 60F. Most of the remaining snow melted by the end of the day. While most of Austin had power, we learned that a water treatment plant had failed overnight. Many Austin homes didn’t have water anyway, due to burst pipes and dripping faucets nearly draining our reservoirs and lowering the water pressure. But now those of us who still had water were under a boil notice. And while many Austinites had regained power, many were still without - making it pretty difficult to boil water.
Water availability became the new crisis, and it remained the dominant crisis through early Tuesday, Feb. 23.
I spent Saturday mostly reorienting myself to a post-storm world—I ran some errands, went to the post office, graded some of a backlog of essays, etc. Kenna found herself restless at home, so she went to help deliver water with a mutual aid organization. We both helped with the water distribution effort on Sunday and Monday, along with Zach and Jamie, another friend of ours.
The water distribution site was run not by the City of Austin, but by a leftist mutual aid network associated with the Austin chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. We had a stockpile of “cubes”, containers that could hold 300 gallons of water each. The DSA group organized distribution—they put out a call for people with pickup trucks to come to the staging location, pick up an empty cube, deliver it to one of half a dozen breweries that were distilling clean water to fill the cube, and then delivering the water to, say, an apartment complex or a nursing home that still lacked clean water. From there, canvassers were knocking on doors to offer water to residents.
Jamie, Zach, Kenna and I helped at the distribution site, getting cubes ready to go, controlling truck traffic in and out of the staging location, and giving drivers their assignments for water fill-up and distribution. This work was much less customer service-oriented and more logistics/back end support. I can’t say I preferred one over the other, but the water distribution work was more relaxed and featured less visible suffering than the shelter volunteering. Which was a relief, after the experience of the previous week. I had been feeling…well, exhausted by the scale of suffering.
Austin Water announced around midday on Tuesday that the boil notice was lifted and that all Austin neighborhoods had clean water. The water distribution work continued, however. Many residents still have burst pipes and have had to shut off their water to avoid continuing to flood their homes. My understanding is that the grassroots, DSA-led water distribution effort will continue through the rest of the week.
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Coming back to teaching today was also a relief. I was worried about my students—God only knows what they have been through. My students are all sophomores, so their entire high school experience, save their very first semester, has been defined by the pandemic. Add to that the trauma of the winter storm, and that’s quite a lot for a young person to handle. But most of them showed up to my Zoom lesson and were ready to learn today.
We talked about the storm for a few minutes. In general, I think they were over it, to put it mildly. So we moved on pretty quickly to our lesson on utilitarianism. Getting back to “pandemic normal” teaching today, as used to it as I am, felt like a turning point in my experience of the storm fallout.
I don’t have a grand takeaway from this experience yet. I rather have a hodge-podge of moderately updated priors, mostly that the deregulatory push in Texas is deeper and more cynical than I had thought(!) and that state and local authorities were even less prepared for a series of cascading emergencies than I would have guessed. A possibly interesting philosophical consideration is the extent to which a healthy utilitarianism demands preparation for rare, costly events. But I’m not ready to delve into that question quite yet.
As for my emotional state, it’s too soon to tell—I need some distance, and some reflection, to process. My mindset has been very action-oriented over the past ten days or so, and I will have more reflective, regenerative thoughts when the cortisol infusion to my brain slows to a more normal level.
I am happy to field questions about this experience, if you have them. And I promise to get back to the dusty ancient Greeks soon.
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Asked for comment, Kenna had this to say: “People here are still devastated. Donate. And this destruction happened not because of snow, but because of the cruelty and greed of Texas Republicans. Vote them out. And for God’s sake, make sure you keep extra water around.”
PS. Here’s a pic of Juno, for good measure. She loves Foxey to death!