A full mess up ‘: Texas’ pride in energy goes out in the cold

 

Rage over Texas’ power grid collapsing in the face of a historic winter freeze mounted Tuesday as millions of people remained shivering in the U.S. energy capital without guarantees that their electricity and heat will return quickly or stay on once it eventually does.

“I know that people are angry and frustrated,” said Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston, who woke up in his city to more than a million people still without electricity. “I am so.”

In all, nearly two full days after record snowfall and single-digit temperatures, between 2 and 3 million customers in Texas still had no fuel, generating a rise in demand for electricity to warm up homes unaccustomed to such severe lows, buckling the power grid of the state and triggering widespread blackouts. Tuesday night started to bring more bad weather, including freezing rain.

Making matters worse, hopes that the outages would be a mutual sacrifice by the state’s 30 million people soon gave way to a cold reality, as pockets were l0eft to shoulder the enduring brunt of a devastating power failure in some of America’s largest cities, including San Antonio, Dallas and Austin, and in subfreezing temperatures that Texas’ grid operators had known was coming.

 

The breakdown sparked increasing anger and demands for answers over how Texas, whose Republican representatives taunted California over the rolling blackouts of the Democratic-led state as recently as last year, failed such a huge test of a major point of state pride: independence from oil. And it cut through politics, as fuming Texans took to social media to highlight how, amid urgent demands to save electricity, downtown skylines glowed as their neighbourhoods froze in the gloomy Monday night.

“We’re really upset. “I’ve been checking on my neighbour, she’s mad, too,” said Amber Nichols, whose home in north Austin hasn’t had any power since early Monday. “We’re all upset because there’s no reason to leave whole neighbourhoods freezing to death.”