‘Yall best brace yourselves. I don’t think that the horror of the disaster unfolding in Texas, from the current onslaught of Winter weather, has really begun to sink in to the rest of the country.
My 30 something daughter grew up in Texas and is a school teacher now in Austin. We’ve previously lived in the DFW Metroplex and understand how poorly communities in most of Texas are equipped to deal with severe Winter weather. The farther South one moves in Texas, the less likely cities and counties and TDOT will be well equipped with snowplows and highway deicer.
Then, there’s the problem with the Texas electric grid. At 1:00 AM Monday morning, the apartment complex, where my daughter lives in North Austin, lost electric power. She and I were on the phone 8 hours later with her mood fringing on panic as she and her dog were enduring exposure to subfreezing temperatures in her apartment with no heat and faucets dripping to avoid damage from icing. Concern about conditions at her residence only got worse when the apartment management emailed her that the whole complex had turned off water because of freezing pipes. A friend was able to put up my daughter and her pet overnight without significant COVID risk and she immediately got busy finding a hotel for the next couple of days.
We spoke again just now. She’s on a high floor of the Hilton, downtown, looking out on darkness, broken only by flashing lights on emergency vehicles, serving more to accentuate than illuminate the vast darkness. School is cancelled until Friday. In a couple of days, temps in Austin will rise above freezing in the daytime. In the meantime, my daughter can keep the hotel room until Thursday morning.
Some way or another, my daughter will be OK. Her Mom and I are able to pay to help cushion her against the most dangerous consequences of the Texas Winter storm. But Austin hotels, with or without power, are more than fully booked. She tells me that hotel food service is curtailed because of delivery interruptions. Restaurants and markets are the same story. Her hotel is a tiny island of electrification in a sea of urban and suburban darkness.
But I’m not really worried about my own daughter. We’ll find ways to keep her safe. Yet I can’t help but worry about so many other Texans, whom I don’t know personally, but whom I nevertheless know for certain have been shivering, in darkness, hungry, thirsty and suffering from cold with no financial or social way out. It’s hella harder for for a family of four to crash for the night on a friend’s couch and paying for a hotel is simply out of reach for many hardworking people, especially those disemployed by the current, not yet addressed economic debacle in America.
So, I’m bracing myself for the seemingly inevitable stories out of Texas, in the next few days, of the very young and very old who succumb to Texas’s temporary regression to the 18th Century. I’m afraid lots of terrible news is about to come out of an unfolding disaster in Texas, but maybe I’m wrong. I hope so.
PS
Tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan for inspiring this essay’s title —