In retrospect? That should have been a sign.
That is a 135-car pileup on Thursday, the 11th. Before all the actual ice and snow started. (There's a decent article about it here, but fair warning - video at the top auto-plays, so if you don't want to see cars stacking up...)
I mean, don't get me wrong... this was kind of a sign too:
I am roughly north of Dallas and Fort Worth, so deep, deep into the blue.
But honestly? Snow and ice here isn't that unusual. We get a couple of inches, everything shuts down because it happens like once a year and nobody knows how to drive on it - and it usually comes with ice and we have way too many overpasses and nothing but sanding trucks - and that's it.
Except... there was this:
And that thing on Monday is a five. We don't get single-digit temperatures here often. Like... sometimes we get a 9? Mostly we get teens and twenties. So that was gonna suck...
This was pretty shitty too:
And y'know... by this point, we're all bracing for cold and that was really it.
I mean... by Friday afternoon, this had shown up and I was threatening to leave the state:
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| THREE?! |
Aaand we ended up here:
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| The fuck. I did not know that "igloo" was an option for the day. |
For the first day or so, the whole thing was kind of fun, ya know?
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| Fun fact: this dog in this coat? Will pee. But he will not poop. Apparently butt flaps mean one cannot poop. |
I annoyed the shit out of one of my BOs with questions about whether I should bring up Cessa's blanket. ("No." "Are you sure?" "Yes." "Okay, but it's gonna get down to negative numbers and snow." "She is a beach ball and they'll chase her away if she's wearing the evil striped blueberry costume." "But... cold and snow." "You can bring it up if you really want to, but even if we put it on her, it'll get taken off so she can share the round bale and the shelter." "...Okay, fine.")
Dragon temporarily got a blanket - oh my god, my not-quite-a-yearling wears a 63" blanket - and promptly shed it. We think because that blanket didn't have leg straps and that wasn't noticed in time to fix the problem, she or one of her pasturemates just kind of... peeled it off her. It was still buckled and everything, which is impressive.
And then Monday hit.
Around 2 AM, my husband and I both woke up out of a sound sleep. We keep a big fan running at night, both as white noise generation and because our bedroom is somehow the warmest room in the house, despite being right across from the AC unit. And when the power shuts off... the fan shuts off.
And then, an hour later, when the power comes back on, the fan comes back on.
And then, an hour after that, when the power shuts off again, the fan shuts off.
We weren't smart enough that night to actually turn the damned thing off, so it kept us up the rest of the night.
All day Monday, the power cycled on and then off. On and then off. We had a period of about 3 hours in the middle of the afternoon, which let the house warm back up to normal temperatures, and then back to the hour on/hour off cycle yet again. I spent half the afternoon working on a blanket I'm crocheting for one of my BOs; it's in that awkward stage of "need to sit down and sew bits together," so this seemed like an ideal time.
Granted, we also found out as the sun was setting that we had... two AA batteries, four AAA batteries, two 9-volts, and a 4-pack of Cs of questionable age. And approximately half a dozen battery-powered things that needed... you guessed it, AA or AAA batteries. Fortunately, all of those had fresh batteries. We also had a dead box of small matches (matches die; who knew?), a box of long matches, and the worst long-necked lighter in existence... and two tea-light candles and a pair of emergency candles that I just realized I failed to point out to my husband - oops. And our chimney hasn't been cleaned in the... erm... fourteen years we've been in this house, and god only knows if the church that owned the house before us ever did it. So we weren't having a fire, that's for sure.
That evening was when my parents let me know that after rolling blackouts since midnight, they were entirely out of power starting around dinner. Concerning, but not the end of the world. Also spawned this piece of conversation, which is at least good for a laugh:
By Tuesday, this was becoming less fun. We were smart enough to not turn on the fan before bed, so we sort of got a full night's sleep (It was too quiet. I could hear the dog digesting, I swear to god.). Power continued to come up for an hour, drop for an hour. Come up for an hour, drop for an hour.
Well, ok. Let's be realistic here. It was never an hour. It was 50 minutes. Or 70 minutes. Or 48 minutes. Or 55 minutes. Always came up at roughly the same time - we started on the half hour, but by Tuesday morning were on the hour - but we'd lose power at slightly different intervals each time. I thrive on order; it was driving me insane.
Parents continued to be out of power, and it was upper 40s in their house. Because we were getting intermittent power, we stayed upper 50s into lower 60s in the house the whole time, but... they did not. My parents are creeping up on their 70s, so that was concerning. They were doing their best to stay warm, but only so much they could do.
It snowed overnight. Midday, we got word that the city wanted us to conserve water; the water treatment plants had lost power, but it came back up. That said... with everyone dripping faucets to keep pipes from freezing, they were concerned that if the water levels dropped too low, we might have to boil water. Note to future self: next time they say this, start hoarding water...
We woke up Wednesday to more of the same. Fortunately, my parents woke up to power; their driveway is quite steep, so they couldn't just back out and I really, really didn't want either of them out there trying to clean it off... but they were 20 miles and an overpass over a lake away, so I wasn't getting over there in my little blue car. I woke up that morning ready to start calling around to see what volunteer organizations were running rides to the warming station. Well, ready to call when we had power, anyway.
It was, theoretically, starting to warm up at this point. Lowest temperature was -3 on Tuesday morning; Wednesday morning was a comparatively balmy positive 3.
That was the good news. The bad news... y'all, we have a fire hydrant very close to the house; our water pressure is insane. But midday Wednesday, we had half an hour or so where we didn't have enough water to fill a toilet tank after flushing.
And then the boil water notice showed up, about the time the water pressure came back.
Do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to boil water when you're on rolling blackouts? Like... we had pots staged on the stove and the minute the power kicked on, someone was in the kitchen to stand over them until they boiled. Bad experience, 0/10, would prefer not to do again. Only was not completely intolerable because I have tried home brewing in the past and had 11 gallons worth of water storage just... right there on hand.
Thankfully, some time around midnight Wednesday night/Thursday morning, the power cycled back on and stayed on. I was able to get on and work for a little while Thursday morning, until just after lunch, when a circuit breaker switch in our breaker box failed and took out the damn internet with it - only time the entire adventure where the power was on, but we didn't have internet.
And then... Sunday, it was 75, because Texas. The snow and ice are gone without a trace; you can barely even tell that we had precipitation at this point.
As of Saturday morning, the boil water notice has been lifted; we have drained all the things and refilled them with fresh, clean water, including the ice maker (and that was a bit annoying). Things are surprisingly back to normal in my area.
My household was very lucky. We were careful, but we were lucky. Barn folks were also lucky; the farmhouse at the barn lost water for 12 hours or so, because someone forgot to winterize the pipes in the crawlspace (oops), and they now know where all the holes in the siding are, but that was about it. All the horses are fine, and for the most part still unclothed.
I have... so many thoughts and opinions and feelings about the Texas power grid and this whole situation. It comes down to: Texas is stupidly gerrymandered - like, the district I live in only didn't make it into the court case a few years ago because there were three districts in Texas that were worse. The state is governed as it is because everything is shifted around to keep the GOP in power. We are reaping the "rewards" of politicians who gave their corporate donors all the deregulation they wanted, enabling them to not spend any more money than they absolutely have to and avoiding federal regulation. Winterization costs money, so nobody wanted to pay for it... so fully 40% of our our generation got knocked out by winter. Mostly coal and gas and oil plants went down, along with one of the nuclear plants and some of the wind farms. People are dead. If you want to show up here and blame the average Texan for this shit, go away or be blocked, because I am in no mood to fuck around.
