February 25, 2021
You may need heard about a little bit snowstorm that occurred in Texas final week. Should you skilled it, you may nonetheless be reeling a little bit — or loads, relying on whether or not you had been one of many 4.5 million residents whose energy and warmth had been lower off by the state to save lots of the failing electrical grid. Large swaths of paying prospects had been sacrificed, leaving them to shiver within the chilly and darkish for days, in lots of instances resulting in frozen and busted pipes (Texas homes will not be properly insulated towards chilly) after which to flooded interiors when the thaw lastly got here.

For six days straight, Austin’s excessive temperatures didn’t rise above freezing, and for a number of nights they dipped to the only digits — at its lowest, a jaw-dropping 5 F. Early on, earlier than the deep chilly arrived, ice coated and broke bushes. Then practically 6-1/2 inches of snow blanketed town, the largest