Image from Tuesday morning. 
Outages have spread to Louisiana and Mississippi.
BBC radio last night reported Texans were burning their furniture to stay warm. Think about that. Now quick, flip to an aerial shot of a U.S. naval armada and change the subject to America’s greatness.
So far the forecast ice storm here in the Cesspool of Sin has been a bust (thankfully), but residents are still getting snow this morning in San Antonio, Texas. In Dallas, The Atlantic‘s Andrew Exum was still without power yesterday. His dog’s water dish in the kitchen was frozen Tuesday morning.
It’s what happens when you put people who don’t believe in government in charge of running it. Ask the half million Americans dead from COVID-19. Right, you can’t.
Exum explains:
There is a certain kind of conservative politician here in Texas who spends a sizable part of his day obsessing about the state of California. Such politicians have spent much of the past few years mercilessly teasing the progressive leadership of California for the failures of the state’s power grid.
These politicians have been, for the most part, conspicuously quiet since the crisis began here. The state’s governor, Greg Abbott, has mostly popped up on reliably friendly media outlets—local news stations, the evening shows on Fox News—where he knows he will not face hard questions.
But hard questions will be asked, because the failures of ERCOT ultimately belong to the leaders of a state who insisted that, by design, the buck must stop with them and not with the federal government. “The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” one expert told the Houston Chronicle. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.”
Texas’s go-it-alone aversion to federal oversight contributed, to be sure. Plus it’s conservative faith in an all-seeing, all-knowing Market. And citizens’ conditioned to hate taxes. And their expectation of getting reliable services on the cheap. All from people who, if they think that much about it, will look you in the eye and remind you there is no free lunch in this country. Who is taking bets Texas Republicans going without hot lunches this week will learn from the experience?
Note: Click to enlarge.
Gov. Abbott and Fox News instead blamed frozen Texas wind turbines that don’t freeze up in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. What failed was unwinterized gas and nuclear plants that went offline in the cold, Julie A. Cohn explains from in front of her fireplace. Texas’s isolation from other national power grids made it virtually impossible to import electricity.
Axios observes, “Between extreme weather events, a pandemic and an attack on democracy itself, America has been pummeled with the kinds of existential disasters that usually come along once every 100 years — and are testing whether we still have the ability to overcome them.”
Somewhere in America, the next aging highway bridge is ductile-fracturing its way to eventual collapse.