The article presumes the company can prevent hurricane damage. The writer committed journo malpractice
Well, they can’t so fair enough. I didn’t read it all. just not enough hours in the day.
The author is a liberal who used to work for the AP and wrote a book with a clearly agitating title for Texans called "Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth."
While I am sympathetic to some of the issues he raised in the article (my power, internet, cable, and telephone were out for six days -- it's a good thing I had a standby whole-house generator), the author uses the disaster to take overt swipes at Gov. Abbott, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, and Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Yes, I would also like to know why power lines and telephone poles snapped in gale force winds in The Woodlands area. Many people ask why the power lines haven't been buried underground after all these years. Many trees also fell onto roadways and live power lines, so there is something about the strength of the wood that's been in the Houston heat and humidity for many, many years.
Getting the power back online was the priority, but the fallen trees slowed down the response until the roads could be cleared just to get to the blown substations, transformers, and damaged transmission lines.
And the overall power grid is just as confusing and sprawling as the roadways in the larger Houston area. It would be nice to reconfigure the grid so that long daisy-chained connections to neighborhood can be streamlined and localized instead of crisscrossed like each area was plugged into the most convenient line at the time.
But those issues aside, this article was really a veiled attack on Abbot, Patrick, and Paxton by a former AP writer.
-PJ