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Record Snow in South Texas
Out front, mostly pristine snow
For those that live in the frozen tundra north of Waco, this may not seem much to you who get frozen precipitation on a regular basis, but
A few people went out, driving on powder snow is easy, but tomorrow is going to be a mess.
San Antonio last night dropped down to 9 degrees. That is the sixth time since records started being kept that the temperature dropped to single digits. Couple
that with some freezing rain the day before, and then between 3-6″ of snow depending on where one lived and we had quite the winter event. Today, for a number of reasons (wind turbines frozen up, decisions by ERCOT, and others) Texas has experienced rolling brownouts and some locations have no power at all and won’t for several days. It’s not like we have any equipment to deal with this down here, usually we just hunker down for a day and its gone by the afternoon. But, its not supposed to get above freezing until Wednesday and as I look out my window I see the streets is now slush and once the sun goes down its going to get nasty as it freezes solid.
The family (with Dog) in the Backyard
This is a culvert nearby.
The dog has had a blast, though she didn’t like doing her business too much. Watching her run through the snow with wild abandon was enough to warm any person’s heart. She bolted through the front door twice to galumph in the snow in the front of the house.
Published in General
Yeah, I’m in Fort Worth and I ain’t see anything like this in many, many years.
We are in Buffalo, TX and got 4-6”. It has been a battle to keep water from freezing for our chickens and horses. Gonna be even colder tonight and then sleet on Wednesday. Crazy.
I’d rather sweat than shiver any day.
In the cold you can put on a sweater and be fine – but in the heat there isnt a lot you can do about it..
I keep hearing about “frozen” wind turbines. Funny thing, that. They seem to work fine in IA, and MN. Maybe, it’s because when it’s really cold, the wind doesn’t blow? The Southwest Power Pool, which covers most of the Plains states, said most of their power generation loss was due to “thermal” sources, natural gas, coal, and nuclear. They said a few wind turbines went offline, but seemed to indicate that the were no mechanical issues. I suspect it’s similar to a few summers ago when Texas discovered what they probably already knew. When it is really hot or cold, demand for power goes up, and the wind stops blowing. It’s going to be a record shattering (for February 16th) -25 F here tonight, and the power may go out, because Texas bought a lot of wind turbines, because it would get too hot if we burned coal or natural gas.
Rant over.
We got about a foot of snow over the weekend in Everett, Washington. If you drop by RushBabe49.com you can see a bunch of pictures I took of our backyard. I just got home from an appointment and it has been raining much of the afternoon. The main streets are clear, but the side streets are thick slush, as is our driveway.
San Antonio looked like the photos in the post when I was at Lackland AFB for Basic Training for the Air National Guard. The heaters in the barracks kicked on one night and our flight’s crazy guy (Don’t they all have one?) started running through yelling “Gas! Gas! Gas!” We all ended up standing outside in the snow until the heaters were determined to be operating normally. Meanwhile back in Pennsylvania high temperatures were in the 70’s.
Kendall county put an extra ambulance on yesterday and EMS ran all day and night. Mostly falls and vehicle crashes. My wife pulled an extra shift and there were lots of places where ambulances couldn’t make it up driveways – patients had to walk out to them. Now, I grew up in Maine and one winter when I was in North Dakota it stayed below zero for 31 days, but living here for almost 40 years I guess my blood has thinned. This was my dog Lola while the sleet was coming down and how it looked today. The sun already melted lots of snow from one building.
When we lived near Rochester NY our son noted the irony when school ski team practice was canceled because of snow. (It was a transportation issue for getting to and from the ski area.)
We need global warming to counter this alarming trend of extremely cold winters.
(snicker snicker, chuckle chortle guffaw)
Some people we know around Texas were without power all day Monday. Our town west of Fort Worth runs its own electric utility and we’re not sure if it was intentional or not that for much of the day the power would go out for 20 – 30 minutes, then come back on for 15 – 20 minutes, then go off again.
So far today (Tuesday 7:15 am) the power stayed on all night and is still on. But it did not get as cold overnight as predicted ( 7 F instead of the predicted 0 F ).
The snow we got Sunday night was low in moisture content, so it wasn’t much good for snow men or snowballs. Plus few people here have clothing appropriate for single digit temperatures. I still have some of my gear from living in Rochester NY.
I’ve had my share of snowy winters in MA and CO, including major blizzards and very cold weather. And now I’m perfectly happy in beautiful FL. It’s down to 65 degrees today! Everyone who is in unfamiliar snow, stay safe!!
Nuclear power runs rain or shine, with a very high reliability rate. It emits no real pollution (a coal plant emits enough natural radioactives in the smoke that it would shut down if it was nuclear), is insensitive to fuel cost, and the fuel can be obtained from the US, Canada, Australia and South Africa. Most of world recycles its nuclear waste into fuel, but we don’t because of Carter. It’s safe enough that towns are fighting to keep their nuclear plants open, and it provides lots of good paying jobs to veterans and people without college degrees. Heck, your average nuclear plant has a lot of wasted heat that is available – a creative person could use this to keep a harbor unfrozen or to provide heat.
Yet we screw around with solar and wind. Rant over.
Yeah, my local utility runs a nuke plant, and relatively little wind. But some states in the power pool went heavy into wind, so now it’s cold and the wind isn’t blowing, so we have rolling blackouts in -30 degree weather, so we can share with wind states where it’s 40 degrees warmer.
My understanding, is that a traditional nuclear power plant requires a large body of water for cooling – which is why plants are located near oceans and large rivers, but not inland in places like Colorado or Montana. Texas could have nuclear power. Houston would be ideal for it.
We have abundant hydroelectric power in the Pacific Northwest, yet our environmentalist betters insist on investing our tax dollars in solar and wind, and demanding that we move to a “carbon neutral” economy in 20 years. They are taxing carbon emissions to raise the cost of motor fuel, increasing our gasoline tax to the highest in the nation, and Seattle has banned natural gas heating in all new buildings.
Definitely agree about the nuclear. We should be looking at newer third generation and putting more money into fourth generation research and development. That having been said. I have a fair sized solar system with battery backup which has keep my power on during this event while my neighbors have had power interruptions, so for me personally solar has been a godsend. If the economics make sense than personal solar systems are not necessarily a bad investment. Large scale though solar and wind can’t provide base load power, so they can be an adjunct to the grid but they should not be the long term plan going forward. We should be looking at more nuclear and hydro for carbon neutral and more natural gas for lower carbon options. Although really we probably shouldn’t be worried about CO2 at all because it is still just a trace gas in the atmosphere, and an Important one at that since plants need it for photosynthesis.
I had a conversation with a woman while sitting in the waiting room of a muffler shop a few years ago. She started going on about how cold the weather was getting and complaining about the bad snowstorms that were occurring recently. Then she concluded the subject by saying very defiantly “And with all that stuff I can’t believe there are still people out there who don’t believe in Global Warming!” I just meekly said “Uh huh,” and went back to reading my boring magazine.
There are two nuclear facilities in Texas. One is on Matagordo Bay about halfway between Houston and San Antonio, and the other is Comanche Peak southwest of Dallas. Together they produce about 5GW of energy that is about 8-9% of Texas’ total output. Texas actually lags in nuclear power generation trailing the national average by about 50%.
Coal produces 19% of Texas energy and is dropping as more and more of these are shut down. Personally I think that is a mistake because on big advantage of coal is that you normally have 90 days of capacity on site whereas an NG plant has almost none. NG is now the primary source of electricity at 53%
T Boone Pickens lobbied really hard for subsidies for wind turbines and used that to make a ton of money for himself and saddled Texas with relying on wind for 17%+ of our energy output.
But it’s colder here because it’s warmer somewhere else, especially in the polar regions, don’cha know? There is no arguing this with the true believers.
Thanks for the photos. Our friends from the greater Austin/Bastrop/Round Rock area have been bombarding us with pictures and witty commentary. Nice to see the Ricotexans doing the same.
If you want nuke plants inland, you can build artificial lakes or cooling ponds. The Shearon Harris nuke plant (south of Raleigh, NC) uses the Shearon Harris Reservoir as its cooling water source.
We live in the greater Dallas area and haven’t had power in our neighborhood since around 10 yesterday (Monday) morning. Brrrrrr.
What you need is a heat sink. You can actually use treated waste water or well water (Palo Verde station is in Arizona, after all.
You could actually double-dip on a hydroelectric dam, and run the output water into the intakes of a nuclear plant.
If you have hot steam that is at low pressure out of the turbines, it can be used to power desalination, giving vast supplies of fresh water at low energy cost.
Yes, I am aware that there are designs for such power plants that could be built – but never have been. (at least as far as I am aware) I would be far more interested in LFTR reactors that could use air cooling and have a dramatically smaller foot print than a standard modern reactor. (like fit in a shipping container small) Such a reactor was demonstrated in Oak Ridge Laboratory back in the 1960s, but the government refused to spend more to continue the development.
https://babylonbee.com/news/texans-forced-to-cut-open-cattle-with-lightsabers-and-climb-inside-for-warmth
We were plunged back into the 19th century yesterday in southern Texas with no heat, no lights, no WiFi and even – the horror – no cellular! The snow was fun for a bit, but the cold inside the house was not. We are fortunate to have a gas stove and a natural gas fireplace that we eventually figured out how to turn on manually. We’re still getting to know our home since moving in the fall from up north. We were told that it wouldn’t get below freezing here, and we were already enjoying spring in early February. It was just as cold and much snowier in Virginia, but we never lost power in winter. At least we brought our cold weather clothing with us. I stupidly thought that Texas was better at energy production and distribution than California.