All Comments on 'A Frigid Mother'

Best of luck on your cleanup and recovery.

Thanks for sharing this. I don't know what else to say. Hopefully, the powers that be will learn from this, and y'all not have to face another "unprecedented weather event" catastrophe again. I hope IRL, you and yours are safe.

I fear the financial disaster will be longer lasting. Good luck to you and yours. Thanks for the story.

I have been sad about what the Texas residents have endured. Yes, the Northerners are more used to this, but they are better equipped with generators, plows, etc., and things that are known to be needed. As per usual, the media had stopped talking about this long before a lot of resolutions were made. Our hearts and prayers continue to flow your way!

Our temps dropped to -25° F at night over the same period, but like you mentioned in the story, our infrastructure is used to being below freezing. Doesn't mean MY personal infrastructure is used to it. Glad you made it through, and best of luck with the aftermath.

lots of blame to go around: ERCOT, the Texas Legislature that didn't FORCE the power plants to 'winterize' after the 2011 freeze, etc. I have lived in Texas my entire life (and yes, I am "ancient"). I remember 11 days of below freezing weather in 1983. I have lived with no electricity due to hurricanes (currently 50 miles from Houston).

I had a friend who uses electric heat primarily but had a back up propane heater that didn't bother to get filled propane bottles ahead of the storm 'cause she thought the weather folks were 'blowing smoke'.

Luckily, our family was as prepared as possible, extra food, extra drinking water, extra 'flushing' water; pipes wrapped, faucets running, and best of all, we live within one block of a hospital. I am still astounded at the folks that 'ran out of baby formula'! You didn't buy an extra can? The one thing we will do differently (in the future) is get a small Coleman type camp propane stove (house is total electric). Only one family member had a frozen pipe (and it was in a place that did not cause any damage). Thankfully I have a family full of guys with DIY skills also.,

Great story! I talked to relatives in Houston. They have their power and water back. They probably weren't hit as hard as DFW was. Luckily, you didn't have to depend on Senator Cruz for help. Down in South Louisiana, I only lost power for 39 hours and no burst pipes.

5

Due to the political climate in the United States, and the fact that the current political party in control of the presidency has made it a mainstay of their ideology to get rid of ALL natural gas and propane in the United States of America,

This is going to be a yearly event.

DO not forget that they are on the end of banning all gasoline powered vehicles. Try dealing with electric powered ambulances or fire trucks, or even ELECTRIC PLOW TRUCKS in this sort of situation.

Never lost power, never lost water. Nothing froze that we found. We have gas as well, and it kept the place warm. Had family over who did lose power and water, we made it all work.

Won't get on the political bandwagon, but will say that true Texans showed themselves in helping everyone who needed help. Now if we could just get managers who thought long term instead of maximizing quarterly profits, we'd be better off.

Greatly enjoy your work, always look forward to new stories.

Great depiction of Mother Nature suggesting we take note we are not in charge, I live in NWFL and learnt you have to have the bits an pieces to do running repairs ...either hurricanes or hard freezes.

WillDevo I thoroughly enjoy your writing and look for to more, keep up the great work!

Bend over because here comes your power bill!

AND your governor has decided that COVID-19 risk is so minimal that masking is no longer necessary and TEXAS IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS. Yahoo! ;-)

Thanks for the report. Between Covid-19 the Weather and your Governor you guys are having a spell of tough luck!! Hoping for the best for you and yours.

That was quite a read

Thank you for sharing this. Here in Vancouver Canada we rarely get power losses - all our systems are winterized & hydropower is steady. Our power is mainly lost in wind-storms; we love our tall tress, which in turn love to know down power lines. The wind farms loved the winds

Short-sighted planning: spending an extra 1% to winterize power systems only drops profits by 2% (horrors!) or so, but insures against billions of losses; a hit of .5% on the year’s GDP is conceivable.

You have had a real rough time, we in the north of the uk are pretty used to the cold temps, but still feel for any community that are out of their comfort zone, you all worked together, to try and bring some normality to your neighbourhood.

Good luck with the major cleanup,

Hope you will get back to normal soon.

Mike S Morecambe UK.

We lived through it. Except we didn't get water back until the 25th. 9 days without water. Made coffee with melted snow. Buckets of water from the swimming pool to flush the toilet. No shower. Couldn't cook 'cause we couldn't wash dishes. The only drinking water we could find was in the little coolers that stores have on end caps where no one else thought to look. Thank God for Door Dash and Grubhub.......

I don’t understand the USA! We in Canada have emergency generators on the water systems so we never lose water! We have much colder weather than Texas. What is wrong with your Governor?

Well written story. I hope some serious lessons are learned from this.

I am glad someone wrote about our Texas Deep Freeze in February 2021. The more we learned about the mistakes made by various people, the angrier we feel. We had about 4 minutes of electricity an hour. Do you have any idea how betrayed we felt when our local electric company insisted there were rolling blackouts? We were lucky; no pipes broke. We used the water in our rain barrel to flush our toilet. We will be very disappointed in our leadership from our local electric company to the governor if we face this situation again.

Yeah, that was a bad storm. I was born in west Texas and I’ve lived in north Texas for 55 years and I’ve never seen a winter storm that bad here. I had no electricity for four days, none. And I don’t have natural gas, my house is all electric. I live alone so didn’t have to worry about anyone but myself but it was a challenge. I may be wrong but I don’t think a lot people who sat through both would even compare the 2011 storm to the 2021 event. Well, maybe that guy who thought the NFL might move the Super Bowl out of his new billion dollar stadium in Arlington because of canceled flights. He was sweating for a while, or so I’ve heard.

Was a mess and mostly caused by electric companies' greed. thanks for the story.

Very informative. As a UK resident I'd heard vaguely about this but the extent of the problems never registered.

Why do Texans put up with this kind of incompetence? Abbott should have been sent packing.

We have a saying in misery only in taxass.

LOVE slap-hapy-papy#9