Frustrations are mounting across southeast Texas as residents enter a fourth day of crippling power outages and heat, a combination that has proven dangerous – and at times deadly – as some struggle to access food, gas and medical care.
More than 1.3 million homes and businesses across the region are still without power after Beryl slammed into the Gulf Coast as a Category 1 hurricane on Monday, leaving at least 11 people dead across Texas and Louisiana.
Many residents are sheltering with friends or family who still have power, but many can’t afford to leave their homes, Houston City Councilman Julian Ramirez told CNN. And while countless families have lost food in their warming fridges, many stores are still closed, leaving government offices, food banks, and other public services scrambling to distribute food to underserved areas, he said.
The cause of the problem is of course gay sex, trans people using bathrooms and a lack of guns and bibles.
Filthy sodomites asked for it! Also all the steamy hot gay sex is heating up the atmosphere. Steamy hot gay sex that I never fantasize about!
The Harris County Republican Party criticized CenterPoint in a social media post for its “seemingly lack of preparedness.”
The reason this keeps happening in Texas is republican deregulation though…
Texas doesn’t regulate their power grid…
It’s why they can’t connect to the rest of the country’s power grid…
I’d say someone from Texas should know that, but if y’all did you wouldn’t keep voting Republican >
Connecting to any of the other interconnects would make absolutely no difference in this case, where the issue is a hurricane knocked down trees and power lines. The Texas grid has functioned just fine every single day since the 2021 ice storm that landed it in the news. What’s happening here is a local outage like would happen in literally any city that experiences a severe weather event
Edit: Lots of downvoting but no one explaining how connecting to another interconnect would make any difference at all here. For context, Hurricane Beryl and Hurricane Sandy made landfall with the same sustained wind velocity. Sandy knocked out power to over 6 million people for days in NY and NJ
Yeah no shit. But even we can’t stop MASSIVE STORMS from knocking down power lines. It has nothing to do with what grid we’re on.
It’s a bigger economic problem than people are talking about. I have a manager who works from Houston. He can’t work right now. Several other coworkers as well.
At some point, employers will have to consider the liability of employing someone in Texas, simply because a power outage could seriously impact them.
Florida, all the craziness aside, is actually part of the national grid and, like the other commenter said, usually rebounds quickly.
Texas OTOH keeps insisting their independent unconnected grid is superior, even though the evidence is stacking quite tall against that claim. If it’s not a hurricane, it’s the heat. If it’s not the heat, it’s the cold. If it’s not the cold, it’s the wind.
It’s always SOMETHING with their grid, but I’m sure it has nothing to do with their insistence that their grid be independent. It’s all the WoKeNESs that’s the problem!!! /s
Although being disconnected from the national grid is a problem. This isn’t the problem this time.
This was poor preparation and response by the city and power company. We haven’t had proper tree trimming around power lines and there weren’t repair crews staged for this. Not to mention trees dying off from extreme heat/cold then being blown down.
Florida rebounds really quick after a hurricane. I do have coworkers in Florida, at most they are out for a day or two.
It’s been 4 so far for Houston. And I’m not talking a hurricane which won’t impact most of the state, I’m talking about any power outage across the state.
Yeah, red states are very poor, mostly due to their backwards economic policies. I know someone is going to being up that Texas is actually rich over all, but they still have far worse wealth disparities and widespread poverty than a comparable state like California. So they are indeed still a very poor state.
This poverty is a huge liability. It’s all fun and games complaining about how the gov wrecks everything until you need something like well regulated utilities.
Poverty is always a liability. In the healthcare system, poverty raises the costs for everyone else when they don’t get things treated or prevented.
What bothers me is that there is a whole bunch of financial types who seem to blissfully ignore liabilities. “Those are unrealized costs,” when it should be “those are ticking time bombs.” If you don’t mitigate liabilities like through well regulated utilities those ticking time bombs will always have bigger consequences when they ARE realized.
A lot of inertia at the scale of the bulk of the petrochemical industry.
I would not hold my breath. Businesses will simply throw technology at the problem until they can’t see it anymore. Was just in a meeting today where the boss was raving about satellite phones solving our connectivity issues.
Vote Republican again, I’m sure they’ll fix it!
The governor and both state legislative houses are blood red. Love how MAGA pins all the blame for their policies and any Dem that’s around no matter how lowly.
I wonder if they’re just pointing out that the victims here are already voting sanely, not trying to assign blame.
Repubs elsewhere in the state, as all Repubs do, treat disasters as something to ignore or cheer, depending on who the victims are. If they were capable of distinguishing between good and bad governance (or capable of empathy at all), they would not be Republicans in the first place.
It sure would be stupid if Texas wasn’t connected to the national grid because that would make solving this problem a lot slower and a lot more expensive.
Sure would be stupid…
Trust me, you don’t want connect your grid to our disease. The infection needs to be cut out first.
You guys do have the wind farms. Fat lot of good it’s done you, but…
Poor (not really, fuck him) T. Boone Pickens. He thought they would power all of Texas after he was gone.
Did they not listen to the litter campaign?
