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My Winter Wonderland Adventure, The Sequel: Snowpocalypse 2022
As usual, the sequel is worse than the original.
Those of you who live in places where the fire hydrants have six-foot poles topping them will find it laughable that anything in Texas can be called a “snowpocalypse.” If you are used to something, that makes it easier to deal with, and Texas is definitely not used to snow and ice. I’ve lived in Texas almost eighteen years and have only seen snow here five times. Incredibly, four of those events occurred in the last four years, including last year’s hundred-year storm. It’s a good thing we’ve got global warming or there’d be a lot more snowy days. Based on evidence from the previous “disasters,” most Texans would not survive the state turning into Wisconsin.
The latest incident began a week before with warnings of the upcoming storm in the media. Governor Greg Abbott announced that the power grid, whose failure had caused so many problems last year, was safe and no one would lose power. Since that is an absurd statement, he backtracked and admitted that some people may have temporary outages. So a politician realized that he made a mistake and corrected himself. Or, according to Robert Francis “Beto-male” O’Rourke, Abbott lied because “he let corporate interests buy him off so he wouldn’t do anything to prevent the power grid from failing again.”
The Beto-male, who is running for governor for some reason, has made the power grid loss last year his raison d’être. As you can tell, he was slavering over the possibility of it happening again. Maybe another 700 people would die! That will really help his prospects!
On Tuesday night, February 1st, and most of Wednesday, we had a cold rain but it never got below freezing. That changed on Wednesday night when the temperature dropped into the teens and it began snowing. The sodden ground was frozen and snow-covered Thursday morning. We hadn’t lost power, but we didn’t on the first day of the storm last year, either.
Because of what happened last year, people took the storm warnings very seriously. Most schools closed, as did a lot of businesses. My wife’s clinic closed, so she didn’t have to go to work. I wasn’t that lucky, as emergency rooms never close. I gave myself an hour to drive the sixteen miles to the hospital. My car was encased in ice, so I turned it on and kept it running while I put together my lunch, packed up an extra set of scrubs, showered, and got dressed. After warming up for about twenty minutes, the car still had a coating of ice on the windshield. I couldn’t find the scraper that I’d gotten last year and never used, so I had to make do with a plastic spoon to clear the glass. (Again, for those of you who have to put up with this sort of thing every day for months, I know. I promise I’ll read your posts about the days of 90˚ weather you’ll have to endure this summer.)
After chipping away the ice, I thought that maybe an hour wasn’t enough to get to work on time. However, the roads in my suburb were clear and I got onto the freeway without any problem. I started out at a sedate 60 miles per hour. I quickly passed three wrecked vehicles beside the road and slowed to 50. Then I saw a pickup in the opposite lane skid and slam into the median barrier. I backed my speed down to 45 and immediately hit an icy patch myself. I was able to get out of that without crashing and slowed even more.
Fortunately, there were only a handful of other people on the interstate. Unfortunately, every single one of them was an idiot. I started out in the right lane, but at every onramp someone would zoom onto the highway at full speed, then swerve around me. I moved to the center lane and got bracketed by a pair of semis doing about 60. I guess if you’ve got 18 wheels they don’t skid on ice the way four wheels do. A little later, a group of five cars did the same thing, zipping by me on both sides going 20 miles per hour faster than me. When I took the exit to the hospital, the final idiot tailgated me the entire length of the ice-covered ramp, then sped past me at the bottom.
Work was uneventful. Again, lots of staff couldn’t make it in due to the weather, but there were fewer patients for the same reason.
At the end of my shift the next morning, I stayed at the hospital to sleep. This time, I got put in a patient room, so I didn’t have to contend with creepy dolls, fright wigs, or staff members coming in to get equipment. I worked Friday night and drove home without incident. As I’m writing this on Tuesday, February 8, it’s 55˚ and almost all the snow and ice is gone. We never lost power and there were no widespread outages in the state.
Bad news for the Beto-male. Fortunately, the UT Football News has his back:
Gov. Abbott attributed the power grid's performance to winterization measures taken since last year’s deadly freeze.
Energy experts, however, question whether last week's weather truly tested the grid and said additional reforms are still necessary https://t.co/uZbccUufK6
— Austin Statesman (@statesman) February 8, 2022
In the real world outside Democrat talking points, no one cares. Last year was a disaster, but we literally weathered it, learned our lessons, and moved on. Most folks realize that last year’s disaster was a result of a once in a hundred year event. That means the chance of the same happening the very next year is about 1%. (Someone check my math on this.) And betting your entire campaign on something with a 1% chance indicates innumeracy mixed with arrogance. It certainly does not imply leadership.
Lo siento, Señor O’Rourke.
Published in Humor
A credit card works better than a plastic spoon to scrape that ice. Learned that in Minnesota one year. The first year we moved here from Illinois, I didn’t really pay attention to the weather and ventured out to work the morning after an ice storm. Couldn’t figure out why I was the only one on the road. The county had laid one track of sand down the middle of each lane, so I just rode the sand right into work – where there were only a handful of cars in the parking lot. Learned some lessons that winter.
We got a torrential rainstorm in Chicago in September 2008. Most of the streets were flooded. I found an E-W road that would lead me to the highway which was not passable. It was a two lane divided road. Cars were driving slowly in the left lane which had a bit of water in it. Idiots were barreling on the right lane sending up geysers of water. Is it that important to arrive a couple of minutes sooner?
It was one of these:
Not this:
Congrats on surviving the Snowpocalypse. I too live in the great state of Texas, although near one of its bluest bastions. Among my friends who skew somewhat to the left but aren’t on the insane fringe I did notice more preparedness this time. Stockpiling Firewood and water. Making sure they had food which didn’t require electricity to prepare. The panic buying at the local HEB was pretty pronounced. Unfortunately I ran out of cream before the storm so had to go the day before, but by and large it was a non event. None of my coworkers in MN had any sympathy of course. We are at the part of the year where they get to make fun of my weather complaints.
I didn’t lose power this year (Lakeway), but the driveway was too icy to go get the mail. My car was in the driveway unfortunately, and it was encased in a layer of ice. Some snow too, not a lot, but there were extremely high winds – you can see the leaves at the bottom of the pool:
No shame, way to adapt.
But a tip: a plastic (credit card style) card works great as an ice scraper. And I lose scrapers all the time after the summer.
And it is so fun to ridicule them when they cry about their “heat wave” in the 90s.
Somehow the city of Austin managed to turn the wrong dial and we’ve been in a boil water situation since Saturday. I only know one person that lost power last week and that was just for an hour.
As for testing the grid, the peak energy consumption was about 70GW (last winter peaked at 84GB) and since the windmills kept spinning, things were fine. Wind capacity is about 45GW.
This is one of the nicest things about retirement. The only problem is we haven’t had a good snow/ice storm here since I left the hospital. Going to work at 4 am wasn’t the issue, usually since there were fewer of the idiots you mentioned. Now if things started before getting off shift, that’s a different story. Your next profession needs to be of the nonessential kind. First a cop then a nurse.
One of the big reasons I moved to Texas from Michigan was to avoid weather like you get in Wisconsin. (That and no state income tax.)
My daughter, who is in Rhode Island, experienced her first ice storm last week. She has a video of it, it’s funny. I was a missionary when we had an ice storm. Don’t lock your snow scrapers in your car! It’s also handy to keep your de-icer on you so that you can de-ice the lock of said car. Lovely New England winters!
Rules for driving in snow, in Western New York:
I admit I was much distressed by last year’s snow and extremely low temperatures, power outages, and also the loss of water pressure owing to burst or otherwise failed pipes. Not my own, luckily, but municipal ones. I had no idea my town depended on the water supply of Luling TX! But bad weather teaches you stuff. And not just to collect snowmelt off one’s roof and flush toilets with it.
I liked to think that San Antonio’s blizzard of 1985 taught me stuff, but it really didn’t. Sheer energy – and a plane ticket to South America, which I resolved to use – got me through that. I was living rent-free in a cottage in the Hill Country, and perceiving that the cottage’s owners wanted their own mansion’s woodpile taller, I split enough wood to keep their fireplace hot for days. Then I pushed my bicycle through foot-high snow to the Health Science Center, did some work in the lab, then in the wee hours pushed again into downtown…to the Amtrak station, the only transport facility that was still open. Disassembled the bicycle, stuck it in my big denim bag, got it on the train to Fort Worth, taxied to DFW, and flew out, to Miami and then Montevideo. When I got back home two weeks later, it was like nothing had happened.
To me, San Antonio, or – I just checked Wikipedia now – Henry Cisneros’s political fortunes.
Eh, not only that. You can blame the greenies, too. As I understand it, the pumping stations for your natural gas lines were converted from NG-fueled to wind-turbine-electric driven, so once the wind turbines froze. . .
So, I wonder exactly what provisions were made to bolster the electric grid under Abbott. Maybe the pumping stations can switch back to NG when they need to? That would seem wise.
100% true! I still love Western New York. I forgot you live there. I was in Warsaw, NY when the ice storm happened. My missionary companion was from Las Vegas. Not helpful. Ice storm happened in the middle of April.
Newspapers and experts. They deserve each other.
Anybody with a link of sense knows that no one, especially a governor, can “guarantee” there will be zero failures in an electric grid, and so they read reasonableness into statements like that made by Gov. Abbott. I guess Roert O’Rourke is appealing to the idiots and ignorant.
When we moved to north Texas from western New York state three and a half years ago, we brought with us a couple of our heavy duty combination snow brush / ice scrapers, a snow shovel, and a shovel with a flat, square blade that is great for getting under ice sheets on the driveway and walkway to break up and remove the ice. My cousin (long time Texas resident) recommended all that. She said I wouldn’t need them often, but every once in a while I’d be glad to have them.
Both of our cars stayed tucked in the garage all Thursday and Friday. Our street was in worse shape Friday than on Thursday, as during the day on Thursday the snow and loose ice turned to slush, and then overnight froze into a thick, solid sheet of ice.
One of the local coffee shops was so eager to be open that management put the staff up in a hotel across the street.
To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee: “That’s not a blizzard. THAT’S a blizzard.” 1967, Central Illinois
I remember the snow in Illinois in ’67. Is that a picture of a railroad?
Our front door couldn’t open because there was a 9-foot high snow drift in front of it! People were cross-country skiing to the store! We didn’t have school! yay
This is true that is the part of the year I get to mock them for their weather complaints, so it balances out nicely.
Yeahbut, up here in the upper midwest things melt when it gets that hot. I had a central Illinois road melt all over my bicycle in 2009. In the southwest every thing is so desiccated that there is nothing to melt.
That is an interesting occurrence. I can assure you though it is anything but desiccated in this part of Texas, although it is much worse further to the east. We tend to have both hot and sticky here, although once again my relatives in southern Mississippi tend to claim I have forgotten what is really humidity like. I can’t say they are completely wrong. Truth be told I live in a pretty decent climate. It just has a few inconveniences. The more interesting part of it, for me anyway, is observing the behavior of those around me to these events.