It’s about 10:30pm as I sit down in my home office in Austin to write this post.  The temperature outside has just dropped back below freezing, on it’s way the low 20’s (fahrenheit).  It is the final freeze of what has turned out to be a nearly week long arctic storm, and the worst natural disaster that I have lived through so far.

While this storm blanketed most of America, it has been nightmare for southern states that aren’t used to such intensely cold weather.  This is especially true for Texas.  It’s is a big state and some of it (the panhandle, where I was born) is used to cold weather.  But most of it, like Austin where I now live, is not.

The storm was initially forecast to last about 2 days.  On Sunday night, things began freezing over as expected.  That night it snowed (6 to 8 inches worth, not the typical Texas hint-of-snow), and on Monday morning Austin was, like much of America, blanketed in beautiful bright snow.

But there were widespread power outages.  And people’s water stopped running.  This was not really a surprise, as ice was bringing down tree branches left and right, and our plumbing isn’t designed to withstand heavy freezing.  The city of Austin began asking citizens to limit their electricity use.  I turned off most of the stuff in my house in and dropped my thermostat to 66 degrees.

Then we got some bad news: the power outages were going to last longer than expected.  And some more bad news: so was the freezing weather.

Our infrastructure, our homes and buildings, our city planning, and so on are built with high temperatures in mind.  Temperatures in the high 90’s, the 100’s, for weeks on end.  That’s what we’re used to.  It may dip below freezing a few times a year, and once every couple of years we might get a half an inch of snow that melts the moment it hits the ground.

So when a chunk of the polar vortex spun off and gave us a taste of the arctic, with highs in the 20s and single digit lows, we weren’t ready for it.  We tried to be ready for it, with the week or so notice we had, at the personal level.  I stocked some food and water, grabbed a bit of firewood, charged up all of my devices in case the power went out, got my faucets dripping.  All that jazz.

But those measures only get you so far when the power goes out, the water stops running, and travel is damn near impossible.  Temperatures in homes that were built to keep heat out rather than in sank into the 40s and for some people even the 30s.

I have been one of the lucky ones who’s power and water continued running throughout this ordeal.  I was able to take in my parents & sister, who spent the past 4 days without power.  Though I’m not quite out of the woods yet – I still need to get through this night, and then once everything thaws over the next couple of days I’ll get to find out if I’m one of the many thousands of other Austinites with burst water pipes.

But I have many friends who have been absolutely miserable the past few days.  Stuck in the cold, melting snow to keep the toilets flushing, living on cold peanut butter sandwiches because they can’t cook.  And even they are better off than those who’s homes are ruined from flooding and fires, those who were injured in accidents, those who lost family and friends.  This people of this city were left to fend for themselves, powerless and helpless, and many will be left traumatized from this ordeal.

At this point, most people (my family included) seem to have gotten their power back.  Tomorrow the ice will melt and the roads will be clear again.  In a couple of days everybody’s electric and water should be restored.

But the damage will last a long time.  Property damage, and emotional damage.  This really could have been a wonderful, amazing, spectacular once-in-a-lifetime event for so many people.  If only the power had stayed on.  Without that, it became a nightmare.

I may write more about this later.  There is so much to say about it, so much to unpack… hell, I imagine there will be books written about the events of the past week.  So I’m not going to try to get it all out at once.

Instead, I’ll leave off with one more picture.  For all the bad things there are to be said about the past few days, I did manage to enjoy the downtime a bit.