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El Paso, the only place in the state on the western power grid; or Las Cruces, NM.
At the beginning of last week, I doubt the average person in Houston realized that El Paso was not on the same grid that was down state-wide. Hind-sight is 20-20. One of the worst parts of the outages last week, for me anyway, was the not knowing. If we stay the power may be out all week. If we leave, the power might click back on for good minutes later.
TED travelled to Mexico and then back to Texas where the law required he be isolated coming in from Mexico for 14 days. Ignoring the law hew went to Washington DC to infect Congress.
That is a baseless political attack. There is no such law. CDC recommends quarantine but he is probably tested frequently if not vaccinated.
I wouldn't call it bugging out. The airports were open. Texas is bordered by New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas. A quick plane trip to New Orleans or Tulsa or Albuquerque was possible. Get a hotel room by the airport on the other end. One doesn't have to be wealthy to do that.
You're right, one doesn't have to be wealthy to get a cheap $39 motel room. One does need to have a job which doesn't require being here. One does need to have $39 that isn't being spent on food for the family or gas for the old clunker. This is an elitist point of view.
Not everyone has $39 to spare to escape the cold. Back when I was still able to do my own shopping, I often paid for someone else's groceries, at least in part. There are so many people unable to afford a dozen eggs. Senior citizen (about my age) put back the dozen eggs to get just 6 - for a difference of 50c. No way I was going to allow that. Get off your cloud, people cannot do this.
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Originally Posted by charlygal
Huh? Overseas? This has nothing to do with Biden. A Texan could have flown over to New Orleans, Tulsa, etc. Vacation time not needed as they would use wifi at the other location.
You really are hung up on people having the finances to just up and fly away. You DO know there are poor people who don't have the money to buy food for the family - or maybe you just don't think about that. As for "wifi" their work? Tell that to the clerk at your local Publix or Albertsons while you are refusing to use self-checkout.
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Originally Posted by Old Trapper
The majority of people cannot scrape up enough money for basic auto repairs. How would you expect them to just pack up and leave? Most cannot plan well either and never vacation.
Exactly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by charlygal
I'm not blaming anyone for their misfortune. I was curious about personal suffering in an unfortunate situation. I wanted other's opinions because I was thinking what I would do in the same situation.
In a best case scenario, I would personally want to leave and go somewhere with less harsh weather. I was trying to educate myself on the reasons why I would stay in light of my personal circumstances.
I did the same personal review back in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina and seeing all of that devastation.
How wonderful you have that option to just get up and go without concern for your job or money or pets or other humans.
I have natural gas, and I'm not an idiot. I know you can use a match to light a gas stove. But that doesn't change the fact that my gas furnace won't operate unless I have electricity. People weren't running their pool pumps and trying to heat their house to 80 degrees. Even if people were only trying to heat their house to 50 degrees, the grid still wouldn't have been able to keep up with that demand. So the 2.5 million people who lost power and also had gas furnaces were in the same boat.
Two homes - out of 4 million people without power - who brought a combustion device into their home because they were desperate. Yet somehow you translated that to everyone being drunk and doing it.
I am not from Texas. I am from the northeast. I am no stranger to 2 feet of snow and frigid temperatures for long periods of time. Never, ever, have I been through anything like Texas experienced last week. I feel absolutely no allegiance to the state at all. Blame Texas all you want - I agree with you on that. Texas is responsible for this. As in the state. Texans, the people, are not. They were (with the exceptions of the whopping two houses you pointed out) not reckless. They did the best with what they had. The veteran I mentioned that died in his car did not die of asphyxiation. He died because he could not charge his oxygen tank fast enough from the car power. The car was outside.
We do lose power. I don't know why you think we don't. Pretty much every summer, which is when our demand tends to increase. But they are able to roll the blackouts, which is what we were told they would do last week. No problem. We lose power for a few hours, then it comes on for a few, rinse and repeat. That's what we were prepared for. We were prepared for limbs falling on power lines and losing power in the neighborhood for a while because of it. That's a lot different than the entire state losing power. If my power is out because of a tree falling on some lines, I can go stay with a friend across town who has power. Can't do that if the closest place with power is 500 miles away.
BTW, there are parts of Texas that are on the national grid. Those parts never lost power. The state absolutely, positively had the ability to prevent this from happening, but our for-profit system chose money over keeping the power on. Blame them. Blame the state. But stop blaming the people. The people were prepared for what we were told was going to happen, and probably then some. They weren't a bunch of drunk morons with BBQ grills in their living rooms like you insinuate.
I live in San Antonio I think most of the homes in my neighborhood like mine have natural gas for heat and water, on my cul-de- sac a least. Without electricity the fan motor to distribute heat through the air ducts is useless. Hardly any water for the water heater either as the power went off at the pumping station for our area too, it was down to a trickle. Took days to return to normal pressure. Despite only being without power about 17 hours. I know other people across the state went without power much longer. I was lucky once the power was restored it stayed on for good. A neighbor had said we were below freezing for 103 hours. The low Monday morning was 7 degrees and 10 Tuesday morning.
I find this whole question bizarre. Sure, some people bounce when inclement weather comes around. But unless we're talking actual physical danger being likely most people are totally prepared to just deal. Especially when they have property and pets to watch out for. For many this was also novel, we were getting far more snow in Houston than we'd ever seen fall here.
For one, all of the stuff you listed makes it pretty obvious. For two, people didn't see this as a hurricane-type disaster. We aren't talking about an epic blizzard set to bury cities, it was going to be abnormally cold. Like "chilly day at a ski resort" kind of cold. People were prepared for potential rolling blackouts, not 30+ hour outages across entire swathes of cities.
I live in San Antonio I think most of the homes in my neighborhood like mine have natural gas for heat and water, on my cul-de- sac a least. Without electricity the fan motor to distribute heat through the air ducts is useless. Hardly any water for the water heater either as the power went off at the pumping station for our area too, it was down to a trickle. Took days to return to normal pressure. Despite only being without power about 17 hours. I know other people across the state went without power much longer. I was lucky once the power was restored it stayed on for good. A neighbor had said we were below freezing for 103 hours. The low Monday morning was 7 degrees and 10 Tuesday morning.
Howdy neighbor! The plumber just finished fixing our ruptured water pipe. Never in my life have I been so happy to see water coming out of a faucet. I'll be washing dishes and doing laundry for the rest of the day.
As bad as it was in SA, it seems to have been much worse in Austin and Houston. And now we are back to our normal tropical paradise.
Not everyone has $39 to spare to escape the cold. Back when I was still able to do my own shopping, I often paid for someone else's groceries, at least in part. There are so many people unable to afford a dozen eggs. Senior citizen (about my age) put back the dozen eggs to get just 6 - for a difference of 50c. No way I was going to allow that. Get off your cloud, people cannot do this.
You really are hung up on people having the finances to just up and fly away. You DO know there are poor people who don't have the money to buy food for the family - or maybe you just don't think about that. As for "wifi" their work? Tell that to the clerk at your local Publix or Albertsons while you are refusing to use self-checkout.
The above is representative of many jumping on the OP, and it isn't wrong, but is misdirected. The OP never asked why everyone didn't leave but why more people didn't leave. It's perfectly reasonable that those without the means or freedom from obligations didn't leave. But many people who did have the ability and means and the freedom from obligations also didn't leave and I think the question was about them.
My BFF who has a lot of money, was scheduled to fly out of Dallas to South Florida Monday. She then changed her flight to Sunday. Then when she tried to change it again to Friday or Saturday, there were no flights left.
In hindsight, she wished she would have originally changed it to Thursday or Friday before the storm.
It appears that all that can be said has already been said here, and this topic has now run its course.
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