In Texas, We Are The Rescue Team

[Nevilledog]

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Katie Gutierrez
@katie_gutz
For @harpersbazaarus, I wrote about surviving the Texas freeze when others—including children—did not, and how the state’s “leaders” catastrophically failed us when we needed help most. I hope you’ll give it a read bc I don’t want this to be forgotten.

In Texas, We Are The Rescue Team
When Katie Gutierrez and her family lost power and water during the Texas freeze, she confronted the deep vulnerabilities in her state and herself as a parent.
harpersbazaar.com
10:41 AM · Mar 2, 2021

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a35695362/in-texas-we-are-the-rescue-team/

It’s nearly midnight in San Antonio, Texas, on Sunday, February 14. The temperature has plunged to 10 degrees, but my husband, Adrian, and I are not yet worrying about how we’ll keep our toddler and baby warm if the electrical grid fails, which it will within hours. We’re not thinking of the hill outside our neighborhood, which will become so dangerously ice-slicked it will effectively trap us in our home. We’re not taking stock of our meager food and water supply, calculating how long it will last us.

We’re laughing, racing from front door to back as snow falls in billowing sheets, making new what has been the same for a long pandemic year.

The next day, parents across the state fit their children with siblings’ too-big beanies and last year’s too-small mittens, taking photos of bright apple cheeks and smiles tipped up to the jewel-bright sky. Some of these children won’t be alive in three days, two, one.

Texas, which produces more energy than any other state in the United States, relies on a free-market electrical grid, a deregulated system meant to lower energy costs for consumers, but which also isolates the state from the rest of the country’s power grid. And despite Texas enduring a similar winter storm in 2011, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which manages nearly 90 percent of the state’s electrical grid, left “winterizing” power plants and wind turbines up to individual power companies.

Not surprisingly, the power companies didn’t undertake the costly upgrades, and when Texas plummeted to subfreezing temperatures early Monday morning, massive amounts of energy fell off the grid just as demand was sharply rising. Texas was “seconds and minutes away” from a total grid collapse when grid operators initiated what were intended to be rolling blackouts. Instead, more than four million Texans were left without power for days, as indoor temperatures dropped low enough to kill people in their homes or force them to make unthinkable decisions to keep warm.

*snip*

[UpInArms]

1. Dear god

“We are the rescue team,” my daughter said, and it’s true. No one is sweeping in to save the day. It’s our friends, our neighbors, our businesses, our community organizers who are risking themselves to help others.

And we are luckier than so many. By Friday, our water is back. Our house has weathered the storm. We have survived where others—whose power never sputtered back on for an hour here and there, or whose homes were less insulated, or who were forced into frightening decisions before we were, or, or, or—did not.

The children’s deaths haunt me. Three children and their grandmother die in a house fire, their mother the sole survivor. An 11-year-old boy freezes to death beneath blankets inside his family’s mobile home. These children, our children, their satin skin and rabbit hearts and brilliant nonsense questions, all their snow-bright futures, dying by fire, by gas, by cold, because our state—this state that produces more energy than anywhere in the country; this state that prizes independence over cooperation; this state whose leaders are blaming wind turbines, the Green New Deal, each other; whose leaders are flying to Cancun with their children while their constituents’ children die—this state has failed our children, who trust us to protect them.

And we are elemental, humans caught in a wilderness for which we were unprepared. When our house lost power, we lost the illusion of our own. We lost the illusion that the larger scaffolding would hold and that if it fell, we wouldn’t be left wishing we could strip off our own skin to keep our children warm. We were the rescue team, and we could not save everybody, and we shouldn’t have had to try.