Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Three days no power, no heat. One day no cell. Another day no water. Basically like camping inside the house. Fortunately I just moved into new construction which was well insulated (R22 under roof, R15 outside walls), so temps no lower than 50s. We still had gas and were able to cook. Traded meals with the neighbor across the street. Not having water was the most difficult part. More than a few neighbors had burst pipes.

Had I not just moved in two days ago, I would have been better prepared and already had a generator. We heard some noise of the impending storm via NextDoor and stocked up on water, food, and filled-up the tank in the Jeep on Saturday.

Lots of finger pointing. LOL Ted Cruz - as my son would say: "bruh". MSNBC and AOC couldn't resist telling us Texas what we should be doing. Governor threw ERCOT under the bus - if it were not for ERCOT, 100% of Texas would be out of power. I understand why Abbott had to point fingers: look how Gray Davis got recalled when he f'd up on power. Basically stupid political shit. Why can't people be level headed?

I think some winterization is needed for power plants, but not too much because I love the low electrical power costs of Texas. Hardening systems costs money. I'm not sure I would like my electric bill to double so a few people won't have to die from CO poisoning from running their cars inside the garage to keep warm. People 100 years ago had it far worse. My public policy stance is not to ensure the survival of everyone. I know it sounds cruel. I prefer to think it's realistic.

Shit happens. We got hit with record lows - for several days. The Fukushima nuclear power plant had the coolant pump backup generators further inland - the risk assessors didn't expect a tidal wave of the such epic proportion to take those generators out. Even the Federation, the ultimate expression of Brave New World (done right) didn't expect the Borg or The Burn.

Hey, at least we are having a discussion of "hmm, maybe we shoulda done that?" In California after the Woolsey fire in 2018, Jerry Brown blamed everything Climate Change and insisted it was the "New Normal" with nary a mention of California's decades of forest mismanagement and populations moving into high risk fire zones.

 

For the same reasons: 1) the fastidious Japanese allowed Fukushima reactors to meltdown; 2) the super-process-oriented NASA engineers allowed the Space Shuttle to explode not once, but twice; or 3) a Nobel Peace prize winner prolonged (actually intensified) endless wars.

I work in Cybersecurity. Whatever we do to assess risks, mitigate risks, and accept risk (there is no such thing as no risk and mitigating all risks is unacceptably expensive or inconvenient or impossible), there is always the unexpected. That is, shit happens. People in modern day society have a hard time accepting this.

 

Not sure there was much to repair. Word is that many of the power plants were on maintenance. This is stuff not in the news, since the news loves to spectacularize things. Winter is maintenance downtime for many of the plants to prepare for the summer energy demands.

 

And uh, wrecked houses (mostly frozen exposed pipes) has to do with the weather (once in a hundred years). Last time I checked, Texas electrical service didn't power Force Fields around our homes.

Now you are just being a libtard. ROFL.

 

You don't know WTF you are talking about and you are letting your progressive proclivities, which are not necessarily wrong, preventing you from thinking straight. This is why you deserve the liberal-retard or libtard moniker. Not only are you a retard, you are an insensitive self-righteous asshole.

I lived up in Michigan for eight years. Most of the houses there have basements. Water pipes go underground and into the house through the basements and then throughout the house. The advantage during cold weather is that the pipes are inside the house and that the basements, while super cold in the winter, never get to the point of a sustained freeze where the pipes will burst. The disadvantage is that you need to worry about stuff like flooding or cracks in the basement walls. Folks who live in areas with basements are well aware of the possibility of flooding and needing a pump on occasion. I had a pump in the basement of my Ann Arbor home, just in case.

Basements are not common in warmer weather climates. In Texas, it's a variety of reasons: a ton of land available to expand out, clay soils that expand up in the northern part of the state, and sandy soils near the coast. In California, lack of basements is probably cultural. During cold winters up in the SF Bay Area where I grew up, many of my neighbors had their pipes burst. We are talking the homes with crawl spaces where the main water line comes up from the ground just in the front of the house where it goes into the crawl space. Most people in the Bay Area know to wrap these pipes before every winter. In Texas homes built on slab, the water pipe is underground and comes up in the attached garage. Since garages are uninsulated, these exposed pipes will burst if exposed to prolonged freezing weather if they are not wrapped. Most people in my neighborhood on Padre Island wouldn't have known to wrap the pipes in the garage because they have probably never experienced weather conditions like this. In case you forget, we are almost 400 miles south of San Diego with respect to latitude.

Regulations are never up to par when the unexpected happens. Regulations are based on the risk of foreseeable negative scenarios in the local area. This is something that you do not seem to grasp. Lessons learned over time usually result in tougher regulations. Don't believe that because Texas is a red state that it does not have regulations. I should remind you that our capital Austin, and major cities such as Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and even the city that I live in are blue cities. Texas has plenty of building codes. In Corpus the building codes are centered around being the coast. The bracing of the supporting roof structure is far more robust than what I've seen in California because of windstorms. I'm not a roofer, but I do know that there are codes relating to roof tiles and underlayments which are much stricter than those in California. In addition, there is flood risk. The top of the bottom floor has to be built a certain height up from the FEMA Base Flood Elevation, their guesstimate for a 1 in 100 year flood. My builder (as with many other builders) have decided to exceed code by an extra foot. This is why many newer construction homes have these thick ass slabs that stand the house a foot higher than the houses next door which were built a decade ago. There is also oddball stuff here that I haven't seen in any other state or locale: the laundry room must be a few inches lower than the rest of the house. This is a brilliant idea because it's a pretty common event that the washer drain gets clogged, but alas, this also increases the risk of a faceplant from tripping on the ledge.*

I should mention that despite Texas having this reputation of being fiercely independent, the state also has its socialist aspects. The TWIA or the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association is an example of this. It's one of those quasi-government deals that insures homes in the coastal counties from hurricanes and high winds.

So really, if you think Texas is one of those places without any regulation, you are dead wrong. The place I'm living in went through several inspections by the city, a land survey, an elevation certificate, etc. before my family could move in. Were the inspections less onerous than California? LOL, most likely. They were probably on par with inspections say in Ohio. Now is there is a theme to the building codes or regulations? Yes, they are risk mitigations to foreseeable risks: hurricanes and high winds.

FWIW, none of my pipes burst. We did have a faucet freeze up in the outdoor BBQ sink, but that was totally my fault as that was the one external water pipe / fixture that I did not check! I could have just turned off the water and wrapped the pipe coming out of the wall.

*Funny story: there is a requirement for a bumper to be installed in front of water heater in the garage. When the contractors were putting this bumper in, they drilled into the slab and hit the main water line. After we fixed the water line, I was like f**k it - you guys are not touching this. I'm assuming the risk. If someone drives the car straight into the hot water tank, then I assume full responsibility for what happens next.

Don't even bother to reply if you are coming back with another guip on north vs south, blue vs red, regulation vs no regulation because none of this house "cracking" stuff has to do with any of that. And stop reading CNN, USA Today, MSNBC, The New Yorker, or whatever headlines you see from floating across Yahoo. You can either choose to learn how things work in real life or choose to be a dick who makes everything political.

 

My mom's rule: multiply by 15 to 400 when it comes to the China Commies.

Most likely 60 in this case. The Indian Army didn't find all the bodies.

 

Yikes. You guys up in Dallas got hit bad. Glad to know you made it through. I kept checking the power maps and noted Oncor was still catching up after ERCOT started to give the OKs to restore power.

LOL, I've been fixated on these (had them up as a dashboard while I worked) since my power came back up:





Lots of state government info at citizens' fingertips, and very easy to find / digest too.

 

My wish is that the cooler heads prevail.

The "news" makes it seem like this was a systematic failure that occurs every decade because of neglect. The problem is that the news never points out how improvements since 2011 mitigated the negative effects to power generation from the cold dips in 2014 and 2018. And of course how different, much more severe, this event was to 2011.

Then of course there is the climate change / global warming angle - of which there is no data that climate change is the cause of this event or that these kinds of events will become a regular occurence.

I totally get it. In cybersecurity, we never get credit for stopping bad things before they happen. We only get blamed when shit happens.