Texas’s Lack of Communication During a Deadly Winter Storm
Like millions in Texas, I woke up Monday morning without any power.
After some searching on my phone, I was told that there would be rolling blackouts lasting up to an hour because of the cold weather. Hours later, our power was still off. At this point, we were searching the house for a radio and trying to get more information from our phones with very limited service. I texted friends asking them if they knew anything and got mixed messages from, “we still have power,” to, “expect to have no power until Thursday.” Wasn’t this something I should be hearing from an emergency service?
After we found the battery-operated radio we found they didn’t know much more than we did. The roads were bad. It was hard to find places open for gas, if they could even pump it. The rolling blackouts were supposed to be happening but like us, there wasn’t any sign of them. The City of Austin website was down and 311 wasn’t picking up. I was learning all of this from locals calling into the radio station between music and DC politics banter.
Where were our local officials? How are we supposed to find out what is going on? If we knew about this beforehand why weren’t we more prepared? Many others were having the same questions and becoming more worried and angry.
Twelve hours later, once we had power, I found our government and ERCOT, the company that manages our power grid, on TV where only a few people with power could watch. The Governor’s advice was to Google where you could find warming stations and call 311. Not the best advice considering how many people don’t have power. ERCOT kept talking about “rolling blackouts” and the more they said it, the less meaning it had.
The lack of information had me wondering, what had I missed? We are told if hurricanes are on their way or if there is a tornado watch, why was this different? To understand what happened, I started to make a list of what we knew before the storm and what we could have learned during. I wanted to know where the gaps of information were and why everything was going so poorly.
Below is a timeline of how ERCOT, the government, and news outlets talked about the winter storm that hit Texas last week.
February 8th
ERCOT sent out a memo telling employees to prepare for the winter storm coming.
February 9th
ERCOT held a meeting where they spent 40 seconds talking about the storm before voting for a new chair and co-chair.
February 10th
Ironically enough the Democrats held an environment caucus to talk about climate change at the Texas Capitol. They wanted to address the fact that according to The Texas Tribune “Legislature didn’t hold a single hearing on any bill related to climate change during the last session.”
February 11th
ERCOT sent out a press release talking about how bad the weather might get and what they planned to do about it. This press release was picked up by a few local news networks. I also received one text message from some local authority I apparently oped into at some point saying that we were under a “Hazardous Weather Outlook.”
February 12th
The governor and news outlets were talking about the effect this cold weather might have on the electric grid. ERCOT spokeswoman Leslie Sopko urged Texans to follow the agency’s Twitter page and website for updates on the grid’s condition.
February 14th
Valentine’s day and a Sunday. ERCOT was tweeting about ways you would save on power at home. Keeping your blinds shut, and your heaters under 68 degrees.
February 15th
We woke up to a different kind of Texas, one that was frozen and without power.
Overnight ERCOT reported a level one Energy Emergency Alert almost an hour later it was a level three.
Over the course of the rest of the week, you could only get information if you had power. Even then it wasn’t quality information. The city kept sending messages that we needed to restrict our water. But, our neighbor who hadn’t opted into the message system had no way of knowing that. The state has plenty of resources to reach out when a disaster like this happens and they had plenty of warning.
Communication in a crisis is necessary to save lives. However, leaders in Texas left a lot of us in the dark on what was going on and how we could ask for help. This is not acceptable and here are some links so that you can find your congressmen and tell them about it, or leave a comment about your experience here.
