The song lyric above is, of course, the iconic call-and-response between Lennon and McCartney on Sgt. Pepper. Paul’s all chipper and upbeat while John is darkly snide.
And those ten little words perfectly sum up the past month of a week in Texas. Was it really just six days?
A Hard Day’s Night … and Day … and Night … and Day … and so on
This monstrous week actually got underway last Thursday morning, February 11, when freezing rain coated a highway choke-point in Fort Worth. Almost 135 vehicles piled into one another all at once. Graphic videos showed horrific scenes as out-of-control 18-wheelers plowed into stopped cars and flipped them like toys. Six people died.
Dire weather warnings started cranking up around then, along with media images of Valentine’s Day revelers at local restaurants and bars on a chilly but otherwise un-noteworthy Saturday. Bad weather coming? Party on. Pandemic? Puh-leez.
Sunday night, temps plunged lower than GameStop stock, hitting just 2 degrees Monday morning. But the power utilities and state government were still all, “Yeah, it’s cold and there might be some rolling outages, but nothing longer than 45 minutes. Set your thermostat to 68, stay home and have a mimosa, it’s fine.”
Indeed, I experienced those rolling outages Sunday night, but the power always clicked on again. Until at 10:40 a.m. on Monday, when it didn’t. At 3:40 that afternoon, power came back for two hours, then shut off again and remained off until after midnight, when it kicked on again for an hour, then went off again until 7 a.m. Tuesday. My thermostat registered 45 degrees.
Blessed as I am with abundant blubber, that’s still pretty cold.
The day continued much the same way, but with longer intervals between power. An hour on, eight hours off. Thirty minutes on, seven hours off, something like that, you get the picture. In the parlance, I’d moved – quite involuntarily – from a “rolling” outage to a “controlled” outage. My guess is they’re called “controlled” because we, the people, have no control over their duration.
My email inbox contained several helpful tips from the utility companies on how to conserve energy during what was now suddenly deemed a “crisis.” I guess keeping my house at 45 wasn’t good enough for them. They advised setting thermostats at 60. I’d LOVE to. Send me some wattage so I can comply.
Fortunately, I still had water. Until Wednesday evening when I didn’t. And then the power came back on and so did the water – all over the kitchen floor and part of the dining room floor, too. At midnight. Oh yaay, it’s Thursday.
I turned off the outside water main – did I mention it was freezing outside? – and pondered my sitch. At least I had power again, so I wet-vacced the kitchen floor at 1 a.m. Then I dragged a soaking wet 9x12 oriental rug from the house to the garage. I’m here to let you know that you can go to your grave well-contented in having missed such invigorating experiences.
And don’t give me **** about the term “oriental.” In this context, it’s perfectly acceptable, I looked it up. Stupid cancel-culture maroons.
Before I fell exhausted into my (finally) warm bed, I signed up on waiting lists at seven plumber sites. The next morning, I waited – coffee-less, because the whole no-water thing – and watched TV news. Images of roads frozen into impassibility and frightened, cold people in need of food, water and warmth, played across the screen.
My son lost power at his house for two-and-a-half-days. He and his family huddled near the fireplace for warmth. On the verge of braving the roads to come to my house so we could all freeze together like Shackleton’s crew, their power clicked back on.
My daughter used an expensive Japanese kitchen knife to hack up her Christmas tree (still in the recycle bin) into firewood. She sat in front of her fireplace, wearing her grandmother’s sable coat, and roasted potatoes. When the fire ran low, she threw in books by male authors she finds toxic.
Friday afternoon, I got lucky as a nice young man with a local plumbing company came out and got me squared away with speed and efficiency. Neighbors saw his truck and pounced on him like a rock star when he left my door.
Speaking of neighbors, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention their generosity – we’ve all been hit to one degree or another with problems and we’ve all been lending each other water and coffee and home-cooked chili.
So by Friday evening, I found myself $750 lighter – a bargain, given the frozen depths that young man had to plumb. But I had both water and power. Civilization restored. I poured a giant glass of wine and heaved a likewise huge sigh of relief.
Here, There and Everywhere
The weekend is finally here, and with it, temps are up from freezing and heading into the 60s by lunchtime. Snow and ice are melting. It’s ending.
Troubles, however, continue to pile up for millions of Texans who remain without power and – unbelievably – fresh water. More than 13 million people – half our population – are reduced to boiling their water, if they have any. Grocery store shelves are bare, since trucks haven’t been able to get through. Same with gas stations.
Most of these near-term difficulties should be alleviated by mid-next week at the latest. But the finger-pointing is just starting and will continue for a long time.
Power to the People – NOT
I don’t pretend to understand the complexities of private, non-profit ERCOT (the now-hilarious anagram for Electric Reliability Council of Texas) which operates Texas's electrical grid. ERCOT is supposed to supply power to more than 25 million Texas customers and is responsible for a staggering 90 percent of the state's electric load.
By the way, excellent job, y’all.
I don’t know anything about ERCOT. I’d never heard of them until Monday. But Texas being Texas, they haven’t connected ERCOT to the rest of the nation’s grid. More efficient, lower cost, we don’t need anybody else’s energy, blah blah, the typical stem-winding braggadocio our swaggering politicians have been boasting about for years.
Our state is like the spoiled little rich kid who won’t invite anyone over to play in the pool, then wonders why he has no friends.
The inevitable political investigations into this debacle should provide many entertainment opportunities. Our governor kicked off the fun by bashing green energy and windmills and Lex Luthor’s partnership with Lord Voldemort. Great start!
Fool on the Hill
Speaking of entertainment, kudos to Texas Senator Ted Cruz for uniting America. By abandoning his freezing, water-less constituents for an impromptu family jaunt to Cancun, he opened himself up for well-deserved national ridicule and really funny memes. I like the one of him in cornrows with the headline, “Ted Cruz denies having visited Cancun.”
His achievement is impressive. It usually takes at least a day to do something humiliating in Cancun, but he managed it in just hours. And then he topped himself by throwing his daughters under the bus, seemingly blaming them because they whined about being bored and wanted a trip and he was just being a good dad by indulging them.
If I'd blamed my kids for a stupid, selfish decision, they’d rightly throw ME under the bus. A real 40-thousand-pound bus. And then they’d back it up and run me over again many, many times. As they should. Some people, however, still stand by him. How they can do that is beyond me.
Help
So here we are, six days of freezing disaster later. In terms of hardship, being unable to shower for three days doesn’t exactly rank up there with D-Day or a zombie apocalypse. It’s certainly a nuisance, especially to anyone downwind. But millions of people have massive home damage that will run into the hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars. Lives have been upended and sadly, inexcusably, lost.
I just can’t help but feel a great deal of this was unnecessary. After all, in Chicago, temps like these are no big deal. Everyone in Texas with a pulse knew this was coming. Yet the system failed catastrophically, putting at-risk people even more at risk because, oh yeah, there’s a pandemic, too.
“Unprecedented,” the pundits say. That’s been the watchword for this past year. It’s interesting – to me at least – that the opposite of “unprecedented” should be “precedented.” It’s not. “Precedented” isn’t even a word.
But we deserve some precedence, because all this unprecedentedness is getting pretty wearisome for everyone.
Hey, maybe Ted can bring some precedence back from Cancun. Along with some Cuban smokes and a sombrero embroidered “stupido.”
Across the Universe
In the middle of all this unprecedentedness, NASA pulled off some unprecedentedness of its own – successfully landing a rover the size of a Chevy Tahoe on Mars. Its name – “Perseverance.”
Good for them and for humanity’s ability to persevere. The irony, however, of getting a complex vehicle to Mars, while folks back home can’t turn on lights or flush toilets, isn’t lost on me.
Get Back
But for now, at least, we’re all ready to get back to some normalcy. Saturday evening, I drove to my favorite comfort junk-food place, In-N-Out Burger, for a number three with grilled onions and a pink lemonade.
Delicious.
On the way back, I noticed that the parking lot of ritzy-ditzy, super-expensive Ruth’s Chris Steak House was packed with vehicles. PACKED. And the line around the neighborhood Chick-fil-A was at least 40 vehicles deep.
To use another junk food reference, that classic McDonald’s jingle, “You deserve a break today,” has never been more timely. Bring it back! Along with the McRib.
So let’s take this break, which we really do deserve, pat ourselves on the back for dealing with our various inconveniences, and continue taking care of those less fortunate who still need our help.
And on Monday, let’s begin the process of figuring out how the Lone Star State – the energy capital of the world, by the way – so utterly failed its 25 million citizens at the exact moment when we needed the state to deliver the goods.
Don’t mess with Texas? I think voters might have something to say about that.
Come together, indeed.
Comments