While a brutal winter storm ravaged much of Texas, Cecilia Corral searched social media posts written by fellow Austinites. Of single mothers and their newborns, others in her town freeze without heat or much-needed food.
“Yesterday I lost count of how many times I cried from what I saw,” said Corral, co-founder and vice president of product at CareMessage, a nonprofit and patient engagement platform focused on medically disadvantaged areas
Millions of Texans found themselves cold and in the dark on Tuesday, unleashing suffering and death in a state that produces by far the most electricity in the country but somehow lost control of their own power grid during a harsh winter. Amid the catastrophe, photos of an illuminated city skylines spread on social media, sparked outrage and revealed how socio-economically disadvantaged families and people of color took an outsized burden from the poor management of civil servants.
‘It’s not just today. It’s not just this emergency. It’s any emergency, ”said Natasha Harper-Madison, Austin mayor pro-tem. “These are the types of inequalities that we normally always see. They happen to be reinforced because of the emergency. “
As freezing temperatures and inches of snow shocked Texans in recent days, cranked thermostats waged war with tougher operating conditions at power plants. With skyrocketing energy demand and diminishing supply, the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which controls the flow of electrical power for most of the state, initiated outages to try to cope with about 34,000 megawatts of lost power.
But critical infrastructure was exempt from the protracted power outages, benefiting residents in the denser, more affluent areas where those services are usually housed, and underprivileged communities forced to move to neighborhoods where resources are scarce.
In Austin, the state’s capital, widespread power outages have re-emphasized the city’s “racial and economic segregation,” Harper-Madison said.
Images showed Austin’s chic downtown – kept online in support of warming centers, a local hospital, government buildings, etc. – interspersed with the power outages surrounding it. In Dallas, skyscrapers lit up in festive red and bright pink this long weekend for Valentine’s Day, frivolously exhausting the city’s power, and Houston’s office buildings also shone brightly on Monday night as locals shivered in their homes.
Initially, rolling power outages were supposed to last a matter of minutes, but when the power grid went down, they have long passed those expectations, sometimes for days. “The current situation is not – absolutely untenable. There is no excuse for this, ”said Varun Rai, director of the University of Texas Energy Institute.
As houses and apartments grow bitterly cold, hundreds of Texans use life-threatening methods such as grills, cars, or generators for heat and become seriously ill from carbon monoxide poisoning, including a woman and girl who died in Houston.
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