I mean... A hurricane hit, and it damaged power equipment along several major cities. Some parts of Houston saw flooding, and a lot of roads are still inaccessible right now which further delays repair efforts. Not sure what else you'd expect to happen.

This isn't like the previous failures of Texas's busted-ass power grid in recent years; those previous outages weren't from weather damage, but from being unable to keep up with demand due to our government's stubborn refusal to make use of the national grids. Those outages could've been largely mitigated if not for bureaucratic bullshit, but there's little you can do to prevent a hurricane from doing hurricane things. The article goes into pretty great length to detail the damage the hurricane left behind, yet doesn't seem to link the cause to the effect.

I'll happily shit on our medieval government 7 days a week, but this feels like a stretch.

[–] mkwt 29 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Not sure what else you'd expect to happen.

Houstonians are upset because when it comes to hurricanes, the category matters a lot.

When it passed through Houston, Beryl was a tropical storm sitting just under the threshold for category 1 hurricane status. Category 1 is the lowest grade of hurricane there is. Even still, 85% of Centerpoint's grid lost power at the peak.

That's a worse result for the power grid than previous storms that were higher category storms. So it definitely looks like Centerpoint has been neglecting maintenance recently.

[–] CreativeShotgun 6 points 5 months ago

This right here. Ive lived here all my life and this storm ranks really low on my list of shit I've seen and high on shitty recovery. The flooding wasn't even that bad, a normal amount for rough storms and it drained quickly

[–] Rakonat 23 points 5 months ago

Difference here is that parts of the state not hit by the hurricane or otherwise saw inclement weather to any degree are also suffering power outages well outside the zone that would be acceptable. Texas (utility) companies doesn't want to invest in redundancies to give their power grid more endurance than it needs for anything more than a mild breeze and some light rain. Over 2 million people lost power, despite many of those people not seeing any other effects of the hurricane. These things don't happen anywhere else along the gulf coast where hurricanes are just as common, and just as heavy hitting. Texas just doesn't regulate their grid anywhere near the Federal standard everywhere else, and it shows with every year for the last 4 years running regional storms taking the grid out in areas far removed from the zone affected by the storm.