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As a brutal winter storm hit much of Texas, Cecilia Corral reviewed social media posts written by other Austin residents. Of single mothers and their newborns, others in their town were freezing without heat or desperately in need of food.
“Yesterday, I lost count of the number of times I cried because of what I was seeing,” said Corral, co-founder and vice president of product at CareMessage, a nonprofit and patient engagement platform focused on medically underserved areas.
Millions of Texans found themselves cold and in the dark on Tuesday, unleashing suffering and death in a state that produces the most electricity in the nation by far, but somehow lost control of their own power grid amidst a harsh winter. In the midst of the catastrophe, photos of the illuminated city horizons circulated on social media, sparking outrage and revealing how socioeconomically disadvantaged families and people of color bore a massive burden from failed management by officials.
“It is not just today. It is not just this emergency. It’s all emergencies, ”said Natasha Harper-Madison, Austin Pro-tem Mayor. “These are the kinds of disparities that we see normally all the time. They just got amplified because of the emergency. “
As freezing temperatures and inches of snow shook Texans in recent days, hand-cranked thermostats faced harsher operating conditions at power plants. With power demand rising and supply declining, the Texas Electrical Reliability Council, which manages the flow of electrical power in most of the state, initiated outages to try to cope with approximately 34,000 megawatts of lost power.
But critical infrastructure was exempt from long-term blackouts, benefiting residents in the densest and most affluent areas that generally host those services, and disadvantaging disadvantaged communities forced to live in neighborhoods where those resources are scarce.
In Austin, the state capital, widespread blackouts have once again highlighted the “racial and economic segregation” of the city, Harper-Madison said.
The images showed Austin’s posh downtown, kept in line to support warming centers, a local hospital, government buildings, etc., juxtaposed with the blackouts around it. In Dallas, skyscrapers lit up in festive reds and hot pinks for Valentine’s Day this long weekend, frivolously draining the city’s power, and Houston’s office buildings also glowed Monday night as locals. they trembled in their homes.
Continuous power outages were initially supposed to last for a few minutes, but as the power grid collapsed, they have stretched far beyond those expectations, sometimes for days. “The current situation is not sustainable at all. There is no excuse for this, ”said Varun Rai, director of the University of Texas Energy Institute.
As homes and apartments grow bitterly cold, hundreds of Texans use life-threatening methods such as grills, cars, or heat generators, and become seriously ill from carbon monoxide poisoning, including a woman and a girl who died in Houston.
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