“H-E-B kept customers fed, if not comfortable, during winter storm. If only Abbott and Texas’ power grid managers were as serious about crisis preparations,” reads the San Antonio Express-News editorial. The grocery store chain lives the Boy Scout motto:
“We are constantly in a year-round state of preparedness for different emergencies,” H-E-B President Craig Boyan said in an interview with Texas Monthly. “We keep emergency supplies at almost every warehouse and have water and other supplies staged and ready to go and kept in storage to make sure that we are ready… when a crisis emerges, whether it be a hurricane or a pandemic.”
State leaders in Austin could learn a thing or two. The H-E-B in Leander, Texas did more this week when the power went out on a store full of customers (Washington Post):
Tim Hennessy remembers a “collective groan” on Tuesday as the lights went out in his local grocery store in Texas. He and his wife quickly grabbed their last items and pulled up to a checkout line 20 carts deep.
Around him were a couple hundred shoppers, some with only credit cards, trying to stock up during a statewide emergency. The power had been going on and off in this Austin suburb as cold weather overwhelmed the Texas grid. But no one told shoppers to put their items back if they couldn’t pay cash.
When Hennessy got to the cashier, he said, she just waved him on, thanked him and told him to drive home safely.
“And it hit us — like, wow, they’re just letting us walk out the door,” the 60-year-old man recounted. Ahead of him, shoppers were pushing carts piled high with diapers, milk, jumbo boxes of crackers — all free. He began to tear up.
The San Antonio Express-News takes a less-favorable view of Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s political leadership:
We admire how seriously H-E-B conducts its business, especially during a week when:
Abbott lied on Fox News about renewable energy being the culprit in Texas’ blackout.
Sen. Ted Cruz jetted to Cancún with his family because it was cold in his house.
Former governor and U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Texans were willing to put up with power outages as the price of keeping the state’s power grid free of federal interference.
Texas’ elected leaders long ago bought into anti-tax agitator Grover Norquist’s infantile, reckless dream of shrinking government to the point that “we can drown it in a bathtub.”
One result of that infantile philosophy is that Texas residents without power during this week’s winter storm found their homes drowning in water from burst pipes (CNN).
Neither Abbott nor Perry before him required the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the power grid operator, to winterize its systems, preferring the laissez-faire approach of Republican minimalist government. Besides, what’s a few days pf huddling for warmth in your car after your house has flooded? Texans are willing to pay that price to keep the federal government out of their business, says Perry, once governor of the state receiving the third highest military spending in the country ($54.8 billion). He and Abbott sound like children.
The Texas Tribune examines what it might cost to retrofit the state’s mostly stand-alone power grid and equipment. Jim Krane of Rice University’s Baker Institute says winterizing for storms like the one this week is simply prudent:
“It’s like insurance that you’re almost never going to use,” Krane said.
Though, that attitude in avoiding cost, he said, is what did end up costing Texans.
“After going through this, I think people would be OK with that,” he said.
San Antonio Express-News agrees: “If a snide tweet or a trash-talking appearance on a hard-right talk show could have done the trick, we’d have stayed warm last week.”
Republicans fear deep-red Texas is leaning purple. This week’s events and their leaders’ own fecklessness just pushed it bluer.