Posted on 03/03/2021 7:59:19 AM PST by bitt
The Texas blackout is over, and water has also been restored. It didn’t get as much press as the loss of electricity, but water pipes froze and broke across a wide swath of the state, causing inconvenience that for many was greater than the power outage. The ultimate source of both problems was the same: the relevant authorities failed to anticipate record-breaking cold.
One question that I have not seen asked is this: why didn’t the relevant authorities–the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, and whatever municipal governments and private contractors have been responsible for water pipes–anticipate a “worst case” cold snap such as what actually happened?
One obvious possibility is that they were so deluged with propaganda about “climate change,” which just means global warming, that they took elaborate precautions against record-breaking heat, but it didn’t occur to them to guard against unprecedented cold. Is this what happened? I don’t know, but back in the days when we had people known as “investigative reporters,” someone might have looked into it.
(Excerpt) Read more at powerlineblog.com ...
p
El Paso Electric is the municipal utility in El Paso. Texas has two big cold snaps previously in 1989 and again in 2011. ERCOT recommended all utilities take steps to prevent generation loss due to freezing.
EPE spent over $4 million after the 2011 deep freeze and came through this one just fine. They aren’t connected to ERCOT, either.
Standby by for the day when the Rat Party succeeds in shutting down coal fired,gas fired,oil fired and nuclear power plants.
Rumor has it that it can get a bit nippy in parts of Texas in January...and a bit toasty in the entire state in April,May,June,July,August,September and October.
In New Orleans, they built levees for a 1 in 100 year flood, and skimmed the rest of the money for political influencing building and corruption. And for a few decades, they were fine.
Then year 100 came, and their sins were revealed.
I’m not saying that’s exactly what happened in Texas, but in any bureaucracy, there is always a strong tendency to go for the short-term solution.
Calling broken pipes that flood homes and make them uninhabitable an "inconvenience" is like Dr. Fauci calling the destruction of businesses, loss of jobs and destitution resulting from the lockdowns an "inconvienience"
Hinderaker had to stretch so far for that take that you can see light through him.
ERCOT leadership and policy is controlled by the PUC and members of the PUC are appointed by the Governor of Texas.
” the relevant authorities failed to anticipate record-breaking cold” After multiple years of having been force fed ‘glow-bull’ warming BS, why would they think it might get cold? Obviously the ecowankers don’t care one whit that warmer is a WHOLE lot easier to survive than cold. Any wonder Edgar Rice Burrows wrote Tarzan of the Jungle and NOT Tarzan of the Tundra? I really don’t like these liars. At all.
1 in 100 years is hardly a short term solution.
Unless you have infinite amounts of money, you always have to pick a cutoff point.
I suppose it comes down to a risk/benefit equation which is often very hard to quantify, after all, how much is a life worth?
And how often does a Katrina size storm come around?
They want their systems to break. It gives them job security. Preparing for hot heat is just a way of them being able to point to the important work they have been doing. The cold was obviously unexpected just like earthquakes and hurricanes. Those things are not related to climate change so you can’t be mad at them for not being prepared. They actually might have been prepared but there is really nothing you can do in advance of a freeze to kremlin pipes from bursting.
Many people left their homes to stay with friends who had running water and occassionaly electricity. I’ve venture most of them never bothered to turn off their water at the main and drain their pipes only to come home to burst pipes and blaming everyone but themselves.
More than one has been highlighted in the headlines whining they lost power so their fridge food rotted/they had no food to last the week and their pipes burst and they’re broke.
Geez, take some self responsibility and put that one brain cell to work. Set the food outside in the freezing snow and it wouldn’t have rotted or take it with you to whomever’s house you went to to help them out. Not to mention Americans refrigerate items that other countries don’t like eggs and condiments. If nothing else, in a freezing house, just open the fridge door.
One San Antonio woman was whining about her fridge food when she went to her parents’ house where they had running water and a fireplace. As if she couldn’t have taken her family’s food with them to help out. She even had to bother the neighbors to heat a pan of water for her baby’s formula. Really? As if she couldn’t use the fireplace or put the bottle under her arm. She also whined their infant was bored and whatever were they to do so he wouldn’t be bored. Hmm, so she, her husband, the two grandparents and whomever else was in the house couldn’t keep an infant entertained between naps and his warm bottle? SMH.
Another late 20s woman, a recent arrival from Boston (doesn’t Boston get snow?), was warned just like everyone in advance of the storm but didn’t bother to buy some food so had to rely on total strangers to brave the roads to bring her food. She looked, imo, financially capable of buying food for herself and the whole block so that wasn’t the problem. The problem, again, is not using the single brain cell in her head. Thank goodness she can go to Starbucks now.
FYI, yesterday was day 11 after the thaw and our grocery store just got lunch meat, eggs and cheese on the shelves. Still no cream for coffee and there are even stricter limits. I’d say a good two weeks would be the benchmark if/when this ever happens again for the stores to get back to “covid normal”. Thanks to Xi, we haven’t been able to purchase cream for coffee for 2+ months.
After 9/11, instead of hardening the infrastructure, they built $$$$ high brick walls around electrical substations. Brilliant thinking there. Now, passerbys can’t see inside, what had been chainlink fencing, if there are terrorists monkeying around.
First, it wasn’t a record cold. I lived in Tx for over a decade way south in Houston and we had snow all over the place at least twice. What was a record was a regular cold snap combined with idiots in charge — the TWOTs that seriously buy into the CO2=>warming silliness.
On the other issue, freezing pipes, Geesh, people. When we moved into our new house in Houston we were told that it was built in accordance with something called the “southern code”. Coming from the Midwest I had no bloody idea what that meant — until I looked it up. What it amounted to was no insulation on water pipes, same pipes could enter the house thru an exterior wall without any insulation, and same pipes could touch an exterior wall (usually brick) once the pipe was inside the structure and running from room to room. In other words, “southern code” means close your eyes to weather and pretend water doesn’t freeze.
When the first cold snap was on it way weather folks reminded home owners to let an exterior tap drip slightly to maintain flow thru all the pipes — no frozen pipes in the house. They also advised hiring a plumber during the spring to “fix that problem”. Anyone who let water pipes freeze .......well, just dumb comes to mind.
As a side note to this thread, please consider the following.
Just as with any state, voters elect federal and state lawmakers who evidently don’t understand or respect the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers any better than the voters who elected them do.
So when misguided, non-elected, politically motivated federal bureaucrats shout “JUMP!” as they did with Texas, institutionally indoctrinated state “leaders” unthinkingly reply, “how high?”
In fact, militia issues aside, patriots can bet that if a given federal spending program is not related to the U.S. Post Service, one of the very few powers that the states have actually expressly constitutionally given to the feds to dictate an aspect of domestic policy, then that program is unconstitutional and win the bet probably most of the time.
"Article I, Section 8, Clause 7: To establish Post Offices and post Roads;"
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
The remedy for patriots being oppressed under the boots of unconstitutionally big federal government…
Patriots need to get their local and state leaders up to speed with unconstitutional federal taxes, taxes that Congress cannot justify under its constitutional Article I, Section 8-very limited powers. Such taxes are arguably state revenues stolen by the corrupt feds by means of unconstitutional taxes.
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
After state leaders put a stop to unconstitutional federal taxes then the states will ultimately find a tsunami of new revenues that they won’t know what to do with imo.
And to make such changes permanent, patriots need to further support state government leaders in repealing the 16th and ill-conceived 17th Amendments.
Air conditioning is so bourgeois comrade. So wasteful. You people better learn to open a window (though none of the buildings are built for air flow any more.)
The way to look at it is - imagine every year, you have jar with 99 red M&Ms and 1 green M&M. You pick 1 M&M. How long before you pick that green one?
In a previous job, I worked with a team building chemical-process plants, and were looking at a site, 1/100 year flood potential was the bare minimum, and that was for industry - not urban/housing/residential construction.
I’m not a hydrologist, but I have heard that when the Dutch build or repair their levees (to keep the Baltic Sea out) they look at a minimum of of 1/10,000 year event possibility.
You missed a big factor caused by the greenies. Excessive insulation. A neighbor down the street in a renovated house seems to have suffered a lot of damage. Those of us in poorly insulated houses came through just fine. The reason? Enough heat loss through the walls ceiling to keep the pipes from freezing.
A lot of these frozen pipes, that MANY Texans have experienced w/this storm.....were the cold water pipes.
A friend of ours was talking with us, about this. No idea why it’s the cold water pipes, and not the hot water pipes....for many....as the same precautions (or, not!) were taken, for both.
My plumber advised me 25 years ago to shut off the water at the main whenever you go on vacation or leave the house for more than a couple days in the winter(NH) especially.
He told me of a family that got back from a Florida vacation to find that their furnace had died and then the pipes froze.
We lose power here in NH at least once or twice every year.
Ice storms are the worst.
Almost everyone I know has some kind of back up generator.
We had a bad wind storm Monday night(50-70 mph gusts) along with single digit temps. My power went out at 10pm Monday night. It was not restored until last night @ 9:30. When I woke up yesterday around 6am the temperature in my bedroom was 56 degrees. I went down, pulled the Honda generator out of the garage and fired it up. Flipped the switched in the basement at the panel and life was pretty much back to normal in about ten minutes. It still took a couple hours to warm the whole house back up.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.