The past week, Austin got less than an inch of ice over the span of two days. It may seem small, but it was enough to do major damage to the town’s power lines. We lost power Wednesday morning a little after 6am. Almost three days later, we were thankful that our power was restored. However, over 62,000 Austinites remain without power, and thousands more on the outskirts of teh Texas capital.

The reasons for the power loss is being blamed mostly on vegetation that was never cut back, so the trees were hanging over power lines, and as the ice weighed them down, they took out the power lines. Then, on Thursday when the temperatures shot back up and everything was dripping with melting ice, the trees pulled out the power lines, apparently. I haven’t seen them yet, so I can’t say one way or the other. But I can tell you, it was an interesting experience laying in bed at night and hearing the tree limbs cracking and falling. When I walked around our apartment complex the next morning, every building had at least one cedar tree with a dropped tree limb. Some had more. And while some were small, some of them were as big as trees themselves. I didn’t witness any cars destroyed by the cedar, but I do think it’s a little interesting only because usually it’s the cedar pollen that causes most of the trouble this time of the year. In my part of the woods, it’s the cedar branches!

Unfortunately, the sky was gray and cloudy. If not, we may have been able to partake in a night sky that Austin hasn’t had in thirty or forty years with all the power out.

The PR people at the energy company have had their hands full. Everybody’s mad at them. Understandably, too. People just want a warm house and to be able to turn the lights on, and since the power first went out, they’ve received mostly broken promises. First, people in Austin were told that the problems would be fixed in 12-24 hours. This was Wednesday morning. We were so young and innocent then! Later, they pushed out their timeline and said everyone would have power restored by 6pm Friday. Eventually, they backed off that and finally admitted that they didn’t know when they would be able to get the power back on. They kept asking for people’s patience, but I think after everything that’d happened, nobody trusted them, and everybody’d lost their patience.

Since then, the city has sought disaster assistance. They finally got Houston crews late Thursday. Can you believe that? And by Friday, they were saying they’d gotten even more assistance, with over 400 crews in Austin. God bless the people working the lines. We really needed them. They’re all heroes in my mind. The energy company, not so much. I don’t think they’re horrible people. I just think they could’ve done things better. Hopefully soon everyone will have power restored.

Myself, I’m reviewing the data, and it seems power’s gone out two of the last three years. Two of the last three years, central Texas has incurred an extreme winter weather event. I think it’s time we stop calling it extreme. It’s regular weather now. Power outages are normalized now, and we should all just come to terms with it and prepare for power outages every winter from now on. That means making sure we all have the right supplies. At home, I joined on a video telecon at work so that I could test my hotspot. I wanted to see how it worked. It worked okay so long as I didn’t open any of the links or pull up any documents. When I did that, the audio went all Max Headroom on me. (You’re welcome for the 80s reference.) I need to look into a signal booster by next winter. Maybe a battery charger, too. We were lucky that it didn’t get too cold, so we weren’t freezing in our rooms, but that doesn’t mean extra candles wouldn’t help.

I’m not a doomsayer, and I don’t think the sky is falling, but as someone who went through the ordeal that was Hurricane Harvey, and now the winter storm of ’21 and ’23, these events aren’t flukes. Who is it who said that once is a coincidence but twice is a pattern? I’ve got at least three dots on my chart. We should all be doing our part to prepare. Not in a prepper way, necessarily, but you know, go the extra mile and be ready for things. In the meantime, share some jokes, laugh, try to change the world for the better, and love the people you love.