The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, February 21st. It is the 32nd of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Ash Wednesday, and Running Towards Grace
People are dead.
This is what it comes back to: that roughly seventy people died this week in the aftermath of a trio of storms and successive cold fronts, and that most of those deaths were in Texas, where the deaths were devastatingly avoidable.
I’ve been struggling with the proper perspective on this. On the one hand, there are so many sources of death we accept, to varying degrees—I saw this morning that American coronavirus deaths passed a new combination of wars in scope. On the other, more people died here than died in Hurricane Andrew, and the economic cost—not lives, no, but still a reflection of the hardships inflicted upon so many people—is estimated to come close to half that of Hurricane Harvey or Katrina. There’s a piece of me that thinks I may be overblowing what happened here. But do you overblow millions of people having no power for days at a time in the midst of historic cold? Hypothermia, of all the ways to die, is such a sad one. Lonely. Slow. Avoidable. Devastatingly avoidable. That’s what killed many of these people. Hypothermia.
But of course, it wasn’t just a hypothermia monster cruising in and plucking people away. It was people failing. Hypothermia may have been the instrument, but hypothermia didn’t make the mistakes. People did.
There was the failure to regulate. Winterization requirements at power plants were recommended. They were not legislated. There was the failure to warn. The anticipation of this weather pattern was similar to that of one a month ago, even though the two were forecast to be vastly different in severity and duration. There seems to have been a failure to even follow direct, reasonable motivations, with energy providers neglecting to winterize their own equipment when doing so would have yielded massive profits this week (I’m not an expert on energy, and I certainly don’t know the situations of individual generators, so I don’t know enough about their incentives to know exactly what happened in this realm, but this is at least the appearance). We knew it was going to get historically cold. We knew there was going to be snow and ice, and then more snow and ice, and perhaps more snow and ice on top of that. And yet collectively, societally and individually, we failed to prepare.
There was some ice in the area last Thursday. The 11th. Ten days ago now. It feels a bit like yesterday. I went to pick up chocolates for my wife, whose birthday is on Valentine’s Day, and the chocolate shop’s power was out. I went to pick up my in-laws from the airport, as they were flying in to see our home for the first time and celebrate her birthday, and I braced myself as I crossed every bridge. On Friday, it was cold, but not torturously so, and we rolled our eyes privately at those at H-E-B whose carts were fully loaded. On Saturday, we prepared for some precipitation. Our neighbors in the other half of the duplex put sand on the stoop and on the steps. We watched the forecast and talked about whether to go to church in the morning or not. By morning, there were patches of black ice, but the word was that the real stuff was coming later, so we went to church (masked, distant, in a sparsely attended building with soaring ceilings), and while the car wiggled a bit every few blocks and I muttered “oh shit” every time, and we drew the line at one grocery store visited rather than looking for sprinkles at another to put on the birthday cake. My wife asked if I thought we should stock up while we had a cart. I demurred, happy to live off peanut butter myself and thinking the likelihood low that we wouldn’t be able to get groceries if needed.
Later that afternoon, the word came through that my in-laws’ flight home, scheduled for the following morning, had been canceled, and that they’d be flying out Tuesday evening. Around the same time, there was a crackling noise in the dishwasher that we suspected was from air in the pipes, leading us to think there was ice in the pipes. A bit after that, there was thumping in the wall when we flushed the back toilet, and with temperatures expected to drop far into the teens, we opened the cabinet doors and began dripping the faucets.
We didn’t know how much snow and ice we would get. Forecasts ranged, and forecasts changed, and it was more a curiosity than anything else. I’d walked to the convenience store to get flour, and the road was a rink, but I thought little of it. I thought we’d just have to wait it out indoors, keep the pipes flowing, and get through it.
It wasn’t until Monday that we realized how bad the situation was. There had been escalating talk online Sunday afternoon about rolling blackouts, but they were described as roughly 45 minutes long—an inconvenience, not a disaster. Before I went to bed Sunday night, I saw an announcement that the rolling blackouts had indeed begun. But I slept fine. Monday was when it hit the fan.
My wife’s a social worker, and she works at a treatment center for people experiencing mood, anxiety, and trauma-related disorders. It’s a small shop, with perhaps a dozen therapists on site on a given weekday, and thanks to the pandemic, it has experience pivoting to remote treatment. They’d made the call the previous week that they’d be remote on Monday. They were prepared for that. They were not prepared for the rolling blackouts. Nobody was. Because the rolling blackouts were not rolling.
This, along with the sight of six inches of snow on our street and a flush of the back toilet sending thumping throughout the house this time, was when the alarm really started—for us, anyway. Some of my wife’s coworkers had been out of power all night. Slowly, as the day went on, we learned why. Statements from the electric company and the electric grid entity itself shared how Texas was close to an entire energy meltdown. Power was in scarce supply, and to keep local circuits from collapsing entirely, and to keep emergency services like hospitals and 9-1-1 centers electrified, electric providers like ours were having to turn off the lights for thousands upon thousands of people.
My in-laws’ Tuesday flight was pushed back to Thursday.
That afternoon, my wife and I set out in search of more food, finally cognizant of the scope of the disaster. It was going to be hard for trucks to navigate snow-and-ice-covered roads, unplowed because of the economic unreasonableness of snowplows in Austin, which meant food stores were going to run low. We trusted that H-E-B would figure it out (if anyone could figure it out, it’d be H-E-B), but H-E-B was closed, and the lights were out for millions statewide, and we didn’t know when anyone’s would come back on.
My wife and I found a gas station a few blocks away that didn’t have power but did have food. The guys behind the counter rang us up on a smartphone, and between that and the convenience store down the street—which did have power—we got enough for the five of us to comfortably survive a week, even if we weren’t necessarily eating everyone’s preferred nutriment. On the way back, we saw a group of women across the street turning off the water supply to their house. They’d wrenched open the little box out by the curb. They appeared to be students at UT, or grad students, and their pipes had frozen. We filled up a few pitchers of water and brought them over.
The forecast for the next few days was frigid nights Monday and Tuesday, an ice storm Tuesday night, and potentially another ice storm or snowfall from Wednesday into Thursday. It was cold. We had power, but many didn’t. Roads were impassable.
People were going to die.
It is a hopeless, powerless feeling to look at a scene as beautiful as a neighborhood covered in snow, shining brilliantly in sunlight, and to know that an indeterminate number of people around your state are going to die because that snow fell in the context that it did. And that there’s nothing you can do to stop those people from dying. All for something that, for you, who lived the first 24 years of your life north of the 40th parallel, is commonplace winter weather. On Sunday, I had been very worried about the pipes. On that walk back home, I stopped being so worried about the pipes.
We were fairly confident our power would remain on, given it hadn’t turned off yet to that point, but we didn’t know that for sure, and we understood the calls to conserve power. I’d been sleeping on an air mattress in the living room (we’d given my sister-in-law the other half of the bed with my wife, since we knew in advance I’d be working some nights while we had guests), but with little insulation around the door and the hopefully-conscientiously-set thermostat placed squarely in the center of the house, it had gotten dreadfully cold overnight, to the point where two pairs of sweatpants, three shirts, and a pair of our thickest blankets weren’t enough to keep me from shivering. Given this, and given that after a conversation about the toilet with my parents up in Illinois we’d decided I should get up every hour and a half to check the pipes, my wife suggested moving the air mattress to the bedroom. A little after midnight, I went to bed, setting a timer for 95 minutes so I’d have a few moments to fall asleep.
On the third wakeup, the sun was beginning to rise, and I looked out the kitchen window at a line of flaming red in the eastern sky. Sunrises cut differently against the snow, and for a motionless moment, it was beautiful.
It could have been beautiful. This week could have been a beautiful week in Texas. A nuisance of a week, but a beautiful nuisance. And relatively harmlessly so. When it snowed in January, as I’ve mentioned before in these essays, there were snowmen everywhere. When it snowed in January, kids played jubilantly. When it snowed this February, kids died. Something that could have been semi-harmless, instead deadly, due to human error. So much human error. Human error from which we were exempt only through the specifics of our careers, for we too had underestimated the consequences the forecast foretold.
Tuesday, H-E-B somehow opened. The in-laws (who were wonderful guests in a time of crisis) headed over on foot. The line was hours long. The woman who checked the in-laws out said she lived close enough to walk. Someone else told them the store had not gotten any replenishment, but that they’d had enough in the back room from Sunday to feed those who came. H-E-B, true to its reputation, was managing.
But things were a long way from safe. Part of the problem facing the state was a natural gas shortage, raising the possibility that even if our electric power persisted, we could lose gas, and thereby the ability to heat water and run our furnace. My therapist texted to cancel our appointment. She lives on the East Side. She was without power. Even her cell service was intermittent.
My wife and I went for a walk that night, the streets in our neighborhood packed thick with a stonelike wintry mix. Our noses ran. The air, between clouds and reflective snow, was bright. We said it felt like college again, back in Indiana. But back in Indiana, people don’t die from this sort of thing.
Tuesday night, the ice came.
I missed watching it accumulate. The second timer failed to wake me, which led me to fail to set the third timer, which led to a frantic dash to the bathroom in the morning when I awoke naturally, as I made sure all pipes were functional (they were). But there it was when I emerged from the bathroom. It coated everything in sight, with temperatures forecast to hover around freezing but not really surpass it under a cloud-filled sky.
I took an inordinate amount of interest in the stoop on Wednesday, making multiple trips outside to sweep away the puddle of water which had drained onto it from the slowly-melting roof. Part of this obsession was that I didn’t want there to be a block of ice out there, but I think a lot of it had to do with craving something I could control. I think this was part of the fixation on the pipes, too, even as the catastrophe that would be a pipe bursting found perspective in my mind.
My wife’s coworkers who had been without power on Monday were still without power. The apartment ceiling of one who did have power had collapsed due to a neighbor’s broken pipe, something that brought with it a fire alarm going off for half a day. With nowhere to go and nothing to satiate her panicked dog, she worked a full day anyway, the alarm blaring through her microphone when she unmuted herself on zoom calls.
My in-laws went to H-E-B again.
As we returned from our walk that evening, we got the notice from the city of Austin that one of the three main water treatment plants had lost power, that a citywide boil water notice had been issued, and that conserving water was paramount. Water had not, prior to Wednesday, been much of a concern, but the dripping faucets and the bursting water mains had drained the system such that it was at risk, like the electric grid, of running dry. This had happened first in other cities, and we’d had a few friends lose water entirely, and our water pressure had noticeably dipped, so we’d stopped dripping our faucets. We’d filled up bowls and pitchers and pots before the notice came down. But yet another utility was crumbling. Who is John Galt?
I woke myself only once Wednesday night. The pipes were fine. Potentially contaminated, but fine. And what’s bacteria when you at least have something coming through the faucet?
On Thursday morning, I turned on the car and let it run for a few minutes. I chipped away at the ice and knocked all the icicles off the wheel wells out of a likely-unreasonable fear that they’d be hard enough and sharp enough to puncture a tire. We loaded my in-laws’ bags. We took the one route to the airport that does not rely on any highway overpasses. They flew back to Georgia on what I think was the fifth flight out since Sunday.
On the way back from the airport, I did have to take one overpass, and the back end of the pickup in front of me struggled mightily to get across, fishtailing like a demon. I texted my cousin, who’d been running a propane camping heater outside his door to keep himself and his girlfriend and her dogs and his friend warm (they, like so many friends, and so many of my wife’s coworkers, and so many people across the state, were entering day four without electricity), and told him that we had more space than we’d had, and that the offer from days prior stood if they needed to come over. I texted his sister, who said they’d just regained power south of Houston. There were snow flurries in the air. I walked down to a bridge over a creek nearby and looked at the bowed trees and at the stranded vehicles on the tiny hillside. I slipped at an intersection on the way home, a slow-motion slip, catching myself with my fingertips. I was glad I’d worn gloves. Del Rio, over on the Mexican border, was receiving ten inches of snow. My friend in San Antonio’s family was without water.
It was cold again that afternoon. Right around freezing. It dropped below 32 earlier than on Wednesday, and when we returned from our walk that night, the stoop didn’t have any puddle to be swept away. The icicles had stopped dripping hours before.
My wife and I were both strung out. We’d been so lucky. We had power. We had water. We had gas (a break in a gas pipe near 12th Street had taken out power for at least one Downtown or East Side neighborhood). And we were still strung out. As we got ready for bed, our water slowed to a trickle. We texted our neighbors to make sure the problem wasn’t specific to us. It wasn’t. There would be no checking the pipes that night. There was nothing in them to freeze.
On Friday, the sun came out, and our water pressure slowly came back. Half the city was without water. The energy crisis was ending, but at least one of my wife’s coworkers, up in Temple, was on day five with no electricity, warming herself and her boyfriend and their dog or dogs by a wood fire. We went for a walk when my wife finished her final session with a client. We saw water gushing down a gutter into a storm sewer, a haggard city worker pacing around it, taking notes. We saw a neighbor running to his water shutoff valve out by the curb. I mentioned a story I’d read that morning about how much mold comes from broken pipes.
I’d taken a 15-minute nap that afternoon, and since my alarm sounded, I’d had a hard time distinguishing between dream and reality. Texts with my brother and his friend immediately upon waking did not feel real. We watched a few episodes of The Good Place on Netflix, and it took me a few minutes when we’d shut it off to remind myself that my wife was my wife and not Kristen Bell’s character. Even then, I didn’t fully believe it. I was lucid enough that, upon seeing the news about the skyrocketing electric bills for those with certain providers, I was able to research Austin Energy thoroughly enough to understand it and reassure myself that we wouldn’t be on the hook for thousands of dollars in electric costs, but I did not feel like my life was actually a life that was happening. I asked my wife if she thought I was dissociating. She told me she’d get up and check the pipes that night.
Midway through the week, I’d begun counting down the hours to noon on Saturday, seeing on the forecast that at that point, the temperature would finally get above and stay above freezing. My wife asked me to do this internally. We were a long way off. But yesterday, after a good night of sleep and—thankfully—a return from my brain to a more present, less confused state, she turned to me at noon and mentioned, “It’s noon on Saturday.” The sun was out. We closed the cabinets. We made plans to walk along the river after the Texas game.
Water is coming back to more of Austin. The reservoirs are about thirty percent short of full, so we’re still all boiling the water, but the roadways are clear and the lights are on for most, and the same appears to be true for the rest of the state, for the most part. We’re emerging.
But people are dead.
On Friday afternoon, I learned that one of my best friends, who lives out in Portland, had been without power and cell service himself earlier that week. Their food had spoiled. He had to get soup and bread from a cart. I had only a vague idea it had snowed in Oregon. On Friday afternoon, I realized that an email I’d sent on Monday—one I had a concrete memory of writing—had not been sent. I have no record of it being written. The memory is not real.
I am, to be fair, on the anxious side of the median brain, and prone to things like obsession and compulsion and perhaps even delusion or dissociation (I don’t know what whatever happened Friday was, though my curiosity isn’t earnest). But if the stress of this week—a week in which I didn’t lose power and I didn’t lose water and I had plenty of food and my pipes didn’t burst—sent me to remembering things that didn’t happen and having trouble distinguishing reality from dreams or TV shows, I cannot imagine the trauma it inflicted upon those who did lose power. And those who did lose water. And those who did lose food. A friend of mine walked for four hours on Monday to find something to eat, something which ended up being room temperature chicken nuggets. My cousin’s fish froze to death in their tank inside. People died. A lot of people died. Frozen to death. In their homes. In one of the safest countries on earth.
There are a lot of things about natural disasters I didn’t appreciate before experiencing one. But one of them is the trauma. I’ll be fine. I was fine the whole time, never pushed to any brinks, lucky enough to have the resources that mental healthcare is easily available and affordable and has been part of my life for a few years now anyway. But for many, I’d imagine that this is going to stick around for years. For a lifetime, even. Their neighborhood, their comfortable neighborhood, turned into a place in which it takes four-hour walks to survive.
The water will come back. Soon, we won’t even have to boil it. The ice and snow, for the most part, are already gone. I’ll wear shorts today, as it’s currently seventy degrees. But for so many Texans, and so many people around the country and down in Mexico hit by this, it’s not going to go away. This is going to stay in people’s brains, and not just in a “better prepared next time” sort of way. This has wounded people. Millions of people.
Those who didn’t die.
Next week’s essay: On the Warm Wind, and Baseball
