I first got word that we were going to get a late taste of winter around the first of the second week of February, when I saw a forecast on The Weather Channel 10-day forecast calling for below freezing temperatures and winter precipitation on the night of Valentine’s Day and the following day. Ironically, our weather had been late spring-like with temperatures approaching the eighties and I thought our winter was over. Now, North Texas had been having cold temperatures and even snow but we’re over 200 miles further south and that kind of weather rarely reaches this far. Even when we do get “cold” weather, it usually doesn’t penetrate below Houston due to the coastal influence. The thermometer might dip below freezing for a few hours around daybreak, but it warms up once the sun is out. We’re only 37 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and its waters keep temperatures warmer here and cold air coming down from the north rarely reaches us.
As the time for the expected winter weather neared, they kept changing the forecast, with forecast temperatures getting colder and colder. I have lived in the Houston area off and on since 1994, with a three-year break from 1997-2000 when I was transferred back to Kentucky and then to northwest Ohio where they have real winter. The coldest temperature I had seen was 17 degrees. There was one ice storm in the winter of 1996-97 but the ice stayed in the trees and off the ground where I lived near Galveston Bay. We had snow, on Christmas Eve actually in 2004, and a few times since, usually about once a winter. Contrary to popular belief, Texas does have winter weather, including snow and ice, every year; just not so much where we live in Southeast Texas. Most Americans fail to understand that Texas is a really big state – it’s almost 900 miles from Orange on the Louisiana border to El Paso and over 700 miles from Brownsville to Amarillo – and another 84 miles to the Oklahoma line. Texarkana is closer to Chicago than to El Paso. In fact, much of the Texas Panhandle is further north than Oklahoma City. There are parts of Texas that see blizzards nearly every year. They get bitter cold weather up there, and snow and ice. I remember once going to Dalhart, a Panhandle town near the Oklahoma border, when it was ten degrees. It’s common to see a 50-degree temperature difference between Amarillo and Houston.
As the time drew nearer, maps started appearing that showed a U-shaped cold front dipping down over the very middle of the country with the eastern and western edges right along the Texas state lines and extending into the Gulf of Mexico. Inside that U was going to be some of the coldest weather seen in parts of Texas in decades. They weren’t calling it a polar vortex at the time; that came later. Instead of halting in North Texas as it usually does, the cold weather was going to encompass the entire state while bringing with it ice and/or snow. Now, Texas and the lower South is unique compared to the rest of the country because of the Gulf of Mexico. Most of the moisture that produces precipitation over the eastern half of the United States comes out of the Gulf. Usually the temperature of that air from Houston south is well above freezing at ground level with colder temperatures further north, with the temperature decreasing with altitude. The normal temperature lapse rate is 2 degrees Celsius per thousand feet. The extremely cold temperatures were expected to be at the surface with warmer air above that – cold air slides under warm air when a front comes in – with the altitude and corresponding thickness of the warm air determining whether the ground would get rain, freezing rain, sleet, or snow. Actually, it had been cold in North Texas with snow and ice for several days, but our daytime temperatures were some ten to twenty degrees warmer. While Dallas was in the low thirties with snow, we were in the forties.
I had already wrapped my exterior pipes a few years ago when we had another cold snap and didn’t feel I needed to wrap them again, but just in case I ordered some new wrapping and tape. I also found some socks or bags that are designed to go over a faucet and ordered them from Amazon. They arrived on Sunday, before it started turning cold. The wrapping and tape had arrived the previous day. The cold air was in Texas and there was freezing rain, sleet and snow coming down with it. It was expected to reach us sometime after dark. I put the bags over the faucets, put some plants inside and settled down to wait.
I was expecting that we would probably lose power, particularly if we had an ice storm. I was happy when the rain we started getting around nightfall turned to sleet rather than freezing rain. Sleet doesn’t ice up power lines and trees and cause power loss. Our heat is gas, but the blowers are electric, so we were going to lose heat if we lost electrical power. However, we have a wood-burning fireplace with a gas starter in which I’d installed gas logs less than a year after we bought the house. If we lost electrical power and the furnaces, we’d have a source of heat.
When I went to bed Sunday evening, it was snowing, with some sleet mixed in. The temperature had dropped into the twenties and the snow was small flakes, but it was snow. They’d lowered the expected amount from 5-8 inches to 1-3 inches then to less than an inch. I awoke before daybreak needing to go to the bathroom. I looked out the bathroom window with a flashlight; it was snowing and the ground was white. I got back in bed but turned on the TV to check the radar. It showed that the snow was moving east of us, although some extended to the west almost to San Antonio. I switched to Weather Nation and we were watching it when the power went off. I was expecting there to possibly be rolling blackouts – we had them once before when Texas was gripped by cold weather. Power would be off for about an hour. I stayed in bed for a few minutes then decided to go downstairs and light the fireplace while my wife stayed in bed. It was still dark, but I could see it was still snowing. It was starting to get light and I could see birds flying back and forth from the feeders in the windows in the den. The ground was covered with snow. Our outside thermometer was showing it was in the low twenties.
I kept hoping the power would come back on, but it didn’t. I tried calling CenterPoint Energy, the company that owns and maintains the power lines in our area, but they weren’t answering their phones and their website was down. Texas gets it’s electrical power at a ratio of about 23% from wind turbine-powered generators, 40% from gas-powered power plants and the rest from solar, coal and nuclear sources. Texas only has two nuclear power plants, and they supply less than 8% of the state’s power.[1] As it turned out, most of the wind turbines stopped turning as they iced up in the freezing rain. Most of Texas’ wind turbines – and we have the majority of ALL wind turbines in the US – are located on the high plains from the Abilene area westward. There are two fields in South Texas, and they continued operating, until the cold reached them, and they iced up. The solar generators were useless – it had been cloudy across Texas for several days and the batteries were depleted. To make matters worse, the solar panels were soon covered by snow and ice. Only the gas, coal and nuclear plants were still producing power. The heavy load started causing generators to trip offline. Then, to compound matters, problems developed in some of the natural gas lines. Methane gas does not freeze at any temperatures ever found on this earth, but the lines sometimes have some water mixed in while the pumps that move the gas along are susceptible to extreme cold – and are powered by electricity in many instances. The cold was much more severe than usually seen in much of Texas and the pumping stations lacked the winterization found in more northern climes. To save the power grid from complete failure, ERCOT, the company that operates the Texas power grid, instructed the companies that operate the lines to reduce power consumption. They began cutting power.
The power cuts were selective, with residential areas the most affected. Power was left on to grids that had various “emergency functions” such as hospitals, fire stations, police stations and water plants in them while neighboring grids went dark. Our neighborhood was dark but the neighborhood on the other side of the street that runs about 300 yards from our house still had power. (That neighborhood also had power after Hurricane Ike while we were without power for a week!) It started getting light outside and the snow stopped by daylight. The sun started peeking through the clouds. We have four dogs and two of them were downstairs with me. The other two stay in crates in our bedroom at night. We don’t let two out together because they’ve had fights in the past and we don’t want to risk more vet bills. I put out pads for them to go to the bathroom in the house but after the sun came out, we let them go outside. I had put the insert in the doggy storm door, and they went through it and I closed it right behind them, so we didn’t allow much cold to come in. This was their first experience in ice and snow, and they didn’t know what to make of it. Fortunately, they did their business quickly and came back into the house.
We have a gas stove, and my wife was able to heat water for instant coffee and oatmeal and do other cooking. Our gas oven has an electronic starter with a valve that opens when power is applied so we couldn’t use it, but we could cook and heat water on top of the stove. We also had hot water thanks to the gas hot water heater, but it was getting too cold to shower. We put two dog crates in the den close to the fire and we bundled up and spent the day close to it. It stayed fairly comfortable in the den all day. We’d run the water every hour or so to keep the pipes from freezing, although the temperature in the house was well above freezing and I imagine it was in the attic as well. We have blown insulation in the attic and the pipes are in it. We spent the day looking at our cell phones – we have a power bank my wife ordered in anticipation of a hurricane once and it supplied plenty of power – and reading. There was a lot of chatter in our neighborhood Facebook group that my wife belongs to (I dumped Facebook and Twitter weeks ago.) Overall, we were fairly comfortable except I couldn’t kick back in my recliner. I finally brought an Ottoman down from upstairs to put in front of it.
The power didn’t come on and we had a dark night, except for the light from the fireplace. I looked into it and thought how that was all my parents and grandparents had, not to mention their parents before them. They dealt with weather in West Tennessee as cold or colder than we were having. They didn’t get electricity until the early 1940s. I grew up in a house heated primarily by coal and wood stoves. We wrapped up and covered the dogs with blankets and tried to sleep in the den. It got cold, but not terribly so. I kept watch on the thermometer and the lowest it got was 43 degrees although it was down to 12 outside. That was about ten feet from the fireplace but the temperature in the kitchen was only a couple of degrees colder. My face got cold, so I covered my head with the blanket I had over me. The power didn’t come back on the next day, but the house warmed up some due to the sunlight. It got up to over 50 degrees in the den. It was in the upper thirties upstairs. We had our water pipes trickling and they never did freeze although our neighbors reported that their water froze up and some had busted pipes.
I’m a little confused about this but I think my wife decided to take a drive that afternoon (Tuesday.) The outside temperature was right at or slightly above freezing and the snow was melting. The street was clear. There was power along the highway and she intended to bring back some food, but every place had lines a mile long, so she came back empty-handed. I was a little miffed that she left the house, but she was bored and frustrated, and it gave her an opportunity to fully charge her phone. We were expecting another cold, dark night so I made preparations to put my wife closer to the fire than she’d been the night before. I’d also remembered a fleece sleeping bag in the closet and put my legs in it. We were just settling in at about 1030 when we heard a beep from upstairs. I think it came from the alarm. I asked, “what was that” and she said, “the power is on!” It was. Both furnaces came on and we turned on the TV. I kept watch on the upstairs temperature and when it reached 60, my wife went upstairs and took two of the dogs. I followed her with the other two after she put them in their crates.
I was expecting the power to go off during the night and resolved that if it did, we’d stay in bed until morning. It didn’t. We took showers the next morning, did a load of dishes, and made coffee. The power stayed on until precisely 1 PM when it went off again. We were back to camping out but at least we had a warm house. It had been below freezing the night before but not in the teens. There was a solid block of ice on our patio from where snow had melted on Monday and run down onto the patio then froze that night. We decided to take the things out of our freezer and put them in coolers on our deck. I also suggested putting the things in the refrigerator outside. I was carrying a gallon and a half of milk, some half and half and some orange juice outside (we had cleared the ice off of the patio) when the gallon of milk slipped out of my arms and burst open. My wife was not happy. Finally, at about 7:30 PM, the power came back on and it’s been on ever since. Things are generally back to normal. In fact, the temperatures are back up into the upper seventies.
There were people who died indirectly due to the cold, but the deaths were needless. One Ethiopian family died because the wife went into the garage and started up her car to charge her cell phone and left the door closed. The door to the house was open and it filled with carbon monoxide. Another family died because they somehow caught their house on fire. One gentleman with COPD died in his truck when he is believed to have gone out looking for a bottle of oxygen because his oxygen generator wasn’t working. The saddest death is that of an 11-year old boy from Honduras who died in an unheated mobile home, but it appears he wasn’t given enough clothes and blankets. None of his other family members perished.
There has been a lot of finger pointing and green energy enthusiasts have been overlooking the fact that most, if not all, of the wind turbines in the state iced up and quit working. Articles claim that wind turbines in colder climes are heated (maybe – and who’s to say those in Texas aren’t) without acknowledging that Texas had an ICE STORM with freezing rain, against which no anti-icing/de-icing equipment in the world is effective. I flew airplanes for over forty years and our instructions from the manufacturers and the FAA was that in conditions other than light icing, to get out of it ASAP. The White House seized on a statement from ERCOT that the power outages were due to the failure of some of the natural gas plants – without acknowledging that with “renewable energy” there is nothing to fall back on.
There has been a lot of talk about people “suffering” due to the power outages, but in our case at least, it was a matter of inconvenience, not suffering. Yes, some people had water pipes burst but I suspect they failed to run them at intervals to keep the water flowing through them. Two of my neighbors had pipes burst but it was because outside faucets froze causing the water in the line to back up and burst the pipe. One was over the garage and the other was in a closet on an outside wall. I have no doubt that the faucet covers I found on Amazon saved the day for us. None of the three outside faucets we have froze. One of my regrets is that we ran out of birdseed for our birds and squirrels. I had ordered some from Amazon, but the shipment was delayed by the weather and we weren’t able to get to the store – and they were probably out. We had a lot of Cardinals in our yard, but I’ve only seen one since our birdseed finally came. I assume they went somewhere looking for food. I hope they come back. On the other hand, we’ve got plenty of finches.
[1] A recent report published in USA Today attributes 51% to natural gas, 24.8% to wind, 13.4% to coal, 4.9% to nuclear, 3.8% to solar and 1.9% to hydro bio-mass fired units.
tennesseeflyboy 