As a brutal winter storm swept through much of Texas, Cecilia Corral reviewed the social media posts written by other Austinites. Among single mothers and their newborns, others in their towns are freezing without heat or are in desperate need of food.
“Yesterday I lost count of how many times I cried because of what I was seeing,” said Corral, co-founder and vice president of products at CareMessage, a patient engagement platform and non-profit focused on medically underserved areas.
Millions of Texans found cold and gloomy Tuesday, unleashing suffering and death in a state that produces the most electricity in the country by farBut somehow he lost control of his own power grid in the middle of a harsh winter. In the midst of the disaster, photos of the illuminated city horizons It has circulated on social media, sparking outrage and revealing how socio-economically disadvantaged families and people of color carry a huge burden due to the failure of government officials to manage.
“It’s not just today. It’s not just this urgency. These are all emergencies, ”said Natasha Harper-Madison, Pro-tem Mayor of Austin. “These are the types of disparities that we normally see all the time. They just got amplified because of the urgency. “
As freezing temperatures and inches of snow rocked Texans in recent days, hand-cranked thermostats have had to contend with harsher operating conditions at power plants. With the increase in demand for electricity and the decline in supply, the Texas Electrical Reliability Council, which manages the flow of electrical power in most states, has triggered outages in an attempt to deal with about 34 000 megawatts of lost electricity.
But critical infrastructure has been spared from long-term power outages, benefiting residents of the densest and wealthiest areas who typically house these services, and disadvantaged communities have been forced to live in neighborhoods where these resources are available. rare.
In Austin, the state capital, widespread blackouts have once again highlighted the “racial and economic segregation of the city,” Harper-Madison said.
The footage showed the sleek downtown Austin – kept online to support heating centers, a local hospital, government buildings, etc., juxtaposed against the blackouts surrounding them. In Dallas, skyscrapers light up in festive red and hot pink for Valentine’s Day this long weekend, frivolously draining the power of the city and Houston office buildings. He also shone on Monday night while the inhabitants trembled in their houses.
Initially, continuous blackouts were supposed to last a few minutes, but as the power grid went down they far exceeded those expectations, sometimes for days. “The current situation is not at all sustainable. There’s no excuse for it, ”said Varun Rai, director of the University of Texas Energy Institute.
As houses and apartments get extremely cold, hundreds of jeans use potentially fatal methods such as grills, cars or heat generators, and fall seriously ill carbon monoxide poisoning, including a wife and a girl died in Houston.
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