--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained, I'm Sean Rameswaram.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, we're talking about the disaster unfolding in Texas. Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most. I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com.
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--:-- Joey Palacios: Snow in San Antonio is incredibly rare. The last time we had a significant snowfall was 1985, and that was 13 inches, so 36 years ago. So we were expecting about maybe two to three inches on Sunday. We ended up getting about four inches by about one or two in the morning. And people were on social media. They were sharing pictures. It was really cool. But things started to get really bad.
--:-- Joey Palacios: My name is Joey Palacios, and I'm the local government reporter for Texas Public Radio in San Antonio. So early Monday morning, as the snow was falling, around one or two o'clock in the morning, things started to get really bad because power started going out across the state. You know how we tell people to do things to winterize their homes, protect their pipes, so on. Well, kind of the reason we're in this situation, our power plants were not winterized for this type of storm.
--:-- Joey Palacios: Sunday night, some of the equipment and infrastructure that helps transmit all the power literally froze over and stopped working. It left our power supply about 34,000 megawatts short. So right around that time, ERCOT, the manager of the state's power grid, started to issue emergency orders to utilities across the state asking people to do rolling blackouts. Because if they hadn't in that moment, the state's energy grid could have been lost.
--:-- Joey Palacios: So to offset some of the power consumption, they had to go to the utilities, do these rolling blackouts just to put some kind of relief on the state's energy grid. And that plunged people into darkness, in some cases for more than 50, 60 hours and over the next couple of days. Every source of power that the state of Texas has, has been compromised.
--:-- Joey Palacios: So at my house in San Antonio, at first I lost power for like nine minutes. It came back on, It was up for a little bit. And then I lost power again for 15 minutes. And then it went out again, this time for two and a half hours. And then it came back. It was on for a very short amount of time. And then it went down again for another, I believe, two or three hours.
--:-- Joey Palacios: And I thought I was losing my mind because it would go up and it would go back down. Go up and go back down. And so throughout the course of this first day, my power went out about 18 or 20 times. And each time it was only coming up for about four to five minutes. And that's what was happening to people not just in San Antonio, but across the state as well.
--:-- Joey Palacios: It got to the point where about four million people just did not have power. It just it got to the point where the blackouts weren't rolling anymore. I would say probably around early Tuesday morning, around midnight, my power went out for the last time. And when I say the last time, it didn't come back on until Wednesday at 124. And even then, there were still like these occasional jumps up to power, and then it would fall down again.
--:-- Joey Palacios: But that was the longest I think I've ever experienced unreliable power in my life. And it was cold. At first, you know, we still had the heat in the house. But then after the heat was gone, it started feeling like 34, 35, 36 degrees in my house when it's like maybe 15 degrees outside. So people are literally freezing in their own homes throughout this energy crisis.
--:-- Joey Palacios: And as this is happening, the local utilities, the state's power grid manager, ERCOT, is not giving people a definitive answer of when things are going to get back to normal. In Houston, a woman and an eight-year-old girl dying of carbon monoxide poisoning after a car was left running in a garage to help generate heat. Grandmother sleeps in her car to stay warm. Parents who ran out of firewood burned belongings to keep their children warm.
--:-- Joey Palacios: A Richardson resident watched the battery level of her partner's oxygen machine drain away and desperately sought help to have it recharged. The situation is so bad, Tara Davis is leaving the state after she, her husband, and her eight-month-old baby had to huddle around the fireplace to stay warm. They went without power for 30 hours.
--:-- Joey Palacios: It was really unclear as to when things were going to be fixed, because even as some of the power plants that went offline were coming back online, others were going offline. So it was like this cycle of power coming back and then losing generation capacity again. Natural gas lines were starting to freeze and some of those gas lines were powering power plants.
--:-- Joey Palacios: So for Monday Tuesday and Wednesday there was just this cycle of like not knowing what was going to happen. It really wasn't until about maybe midday Wednesday that people started to see their power come back in mass. That's what ended up happening at my house. My power started coming back on around one o'clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, and it thankfully hasn't gone out since then.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Joey, tell me how this went from a story about the weather in Texas, a story about an energy crisis in Texas, a story about people dying because of a weather and energy crisis in Texas, to a story about whether or not a Texas senator took a trip to Mexico.
--:-- Joey Palacios: Pictures of Ted Cruz started circulating of him in an airport wearing a face mask with luggage. And then the pictures are him on the plane. And then it starts circulating that Ted Cruz and his family are going to Cancun. And so a lot of questions are rising. Here is Texas' junior senator in the U.S. Senate, and he's leaving the state. And people are asking why.
--:-- Joey Palacios: And it takes a while for us to actually get an answer. And there's a statement that's put out that he says... The girls wanted to take a trip with their friends and frankly get somewhere. It was warmer. And Heidi and I agreed. We took them. I flew them down last night and then I just flew back today. And that was questioned by a lot of people.
--:-- Joey Palacios: Why did he need to go if his wife was going to to make sure that they got okay? How long was he actually planning on staying there? Was he going to come back immediately? Cruz was originally scheduled to return Saturday, not today. It was obviously a mistake in hindsight. I wouldn't have done it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so it became this reinvigoration, I guess, of calls for Cruz to resign. The demonstration led by a group calling itself the Election Defenders Coalition. They accused Cruz of aiding the people who stormed the Capitol 10 days ago by joining other GOP lawmakers in objecting to the certification of the Electoral College votes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we saw a lot of people calling on Cruz to resign then, and now... Ted Cruz, that's got to go. Hey, hey. Those calls for Cruz to resign have reignited. Ted Cruz! Resign Ted Cruz! As he just returned from a trip to Cancun. People are dying. For him to fly to Mexico to get his family warm shows exactly how out of touch he is.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think the national perspective on this story is a lot of people have problems with Ted Cruz and are sort of enjoying the blowback for his trip to Cancun. But as a Texan, as someone reporting on this story within the state, how does it feel in Texas? Is this about politics or is this about someone shirking their responsibilities in the middle of a crisis?
--:-- Joey Palacios: I think what people want right now is they want their leaders to do something. And to see somebody leaving the state when many people just don't have that opportunity, I think that's what's causing a lot of the anger right now that, you know, not everybody has the ability to just get up and leave.
--:-- Joey Palacios: You know, there are folks that do have their own responsibilities here. They have to take care of their families. They have to take care of their pets. They can't leave them in the freezing cold that people are experiencing here. Here you see somebody that was elected to power within the state leaving where millions of people are still struggling for power and for water.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The weather is slightly improving in Texas, but are you saying that the struggle for resources and energy isn't over yet?
--:-- Joey Palacios: This is a layered crisis. Power is back for a good number of people, not everybody yet. But now we have this water crisis where we don't know how long it's going to take for boil water notices to be removed because much of the state is under a boil water notice right now. And that varies throughout the water utilities of the state.
--:-- Joey Palacios: People don't have water pressure. You turn on the faucet in some homes and it's just a trickle or you turn it on and nothing comes out at all. People have busted pipes that are going to need costly repairs now. And, you know, it's Friday. We're supposed to thaw out now. Things over the weekend are going to get better temperature-wise.
--:-- Joey Palacios: When Monday comes back, I think it's going to be about 70 degrees, which just shows how volatile and unpredictable Texas's weather can be. But one of the issues that we're still going to be dealing with is, are grocery stores going to have enough food for people? How long is it going to take the shelves to get restocked?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, for one of the first times, people here actually felt trapped, that they couldn't leave. They couldn't go anywhere. This was catastrophic to the most epic proportions that I have ever seen. We were living in conditions that people in America just aren't really used to seeing. And it's been a disaster.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thank you, Joey Palacios, for sharing your reporting from Texas with us.
--:-- Joey Palacios: Thank you.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, let's talk about the politics of this disaster. Joey, you mentioned that the governor, Greg Abbott, has put reform of ERCOT on an emergency item for the legislative agenda. What does that mean?
--:-- Joey Palacios: I think as things move on and as we get out of this crisis, that there is going to be a lot of public demand for change. And even the governor himself, who has received a lot of ire from people, a lot of anger, has put reform of ERCOT on an emergency item for the legislative agenda.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's a good point. And I think it's worth noting that this disaster has exposed some of the flaws in Texas's energy system. It's not just about ERCOT, it's about the fact that Texas is its own energy island, separate from the rest of the country.
--:-- Joey Palacios: That's right. One of the things, because Texas is its own energy island, is that it can't really borrow power from the East and West grids. Other states can share energy between each other that kind of prevents something like this or at least mitigate something like this but texas doesn't have that ability because ercott is an island of an energy grid texas is a very proud state it likes to consider itself independent on a lot of things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think that's a big part of the problem. Texas's pride in being independent has led to a lack of investment in its energy infrastructure. And that's something that's going to need to change if we want to avoid disasters like this in the future.
--:-- Joey Palacios: I think it's awakened a lot of people to the scope of politics within the state. You know, ERCOT was this obscure, little-known agency that now is on the lips and minds of every single person in this state. Most people just really didn't even know what ERCOT was.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's not just about ERCOT, it's about the fact that the state's power grid is not prepared for extreme weather events. And that's something that's going to need to be addressed.
--:-- Joey Palacios: I know this was a wild weather system, but should the state government or ERCOT have seen this coming? It seems like, yeah. This happened about 10 years ago too, where we had a huge cold snap and ERCOT had to issue rolling blackouts as well. But those only lasted a few hours.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's a good point. This disaster has exposed some of the flaws in Texas's energy system. And it's not just about ERCOT, it's about the fact that the state's power grid is not prepared for extreme weather events.
--:-- Joey Palacios: This time, more people died. This time, more people were stranded. More people ran out of options. And, of course, this time, one of your senators took a trip to Cancun that got him in a lot of heat. This is something that people are never going to forget. This is going to go down as probably the worst energy crisis that Texas has ever faced.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Joey, thank you for sharing your reporting from Texas with us.
--:-- Joey Palacios: Thank you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you want to support our show, you can subscribe to our newsletter, or become a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back with more episodes next week.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks for listening to Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our team includes Amina al-Sadi, Muj Zaydi, Will Reed, Cecilia Lay, Halima Shah, Noam Hassenfeld, and Afim Shapiro. Shoutouts to alumni, Golda Arthur, Bird Pinkerton, Bridget McCarthy, Luke Vanderplug, and Irene the Dream Noguchi.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Facts checked by Lulu Orozco-Perez. Jillian Weinberger is our senior birthday advisor and Vox's editorial director of podcasts is Liz Kelly Nelson.
