The State of the Aaron (18 Feb 2021)

4 min readFeb 18, 2021

I hear that a lot of folks are interested in how I’m doing. Here is an email with all of the details as of the morning of Thursday, February 18, 2021. Feel free to forward this to anyone who is interested.

✅ Electricity

Thankfully, I never lost electricity. This is due to a combination of factors. First, I’m on the same grid segment as a major surgical center. Second, I live in a new development and all of the power lines between my house and the closest electrical substation are underground, so they are protected from wind and ice.

That said, many of my friends have been without electricity or subject to sporadic electricity. Some have evacuated to more favorable conditions. Some are riding it out.

❌ Heat

For reasons I do not yet understand, my HVAC system is not heating adequately. I’m guessing that it wasn’t designed for these sorts of extremes. Thankfully, I own a space heater, but it’s obviously only a partial solution.

❓ Water

As a result of folks largely not understanding how to winterize things, the winter storm has resulted in a large number of burst pipes. As a result of this, we’ve had issues maintaining water reserves as well as water pressure. You probably haven’t heard that our hospitals are experiencing water issues and that one of our major local hospitals doesn’t have water pressure or heat. We’re now under a boil water notice.

Personally, I’ve not had any issues with burst pipes. My house came with a water pressure pump, so I haven’t had any issues with water pressure. However, we have been asked to conserve water (which I’m doing) and I’m affected by the boil water notice. I do have friends who are without water, though.

❓ Natural Gas

We’re being asked to reduce our use of natural gas. That’s unfortunate because folks without electricity who have gas ranges have been using it to cook. Not to mention its use in heating.

✅ Food

I have a well-stocked pantry, since I’ve been trying to limit how often I go to the grocery store during the global pandemic. Unfortunately, this is not the case for everybody here and there have been long lines and limited supplies at the few stores which have reopened. It’s not a surprise, since the winter weather has disrupted supply chains.

If I keep electricity and natural gas, I’ve got enough food to comfortably last me another two weeks. If I lose electricity, that outlook goes down to a week. Thankfully, we’re expecting things to begin returning to normal on Saturday with a predicted significant thaw.

❌ Travel

You’re probably aware that Texas isn’t really equipped to handle winter weather. I’m in Central Texas which has a bit more moderation in climate than North Texas. They have many more occurrences of winter weather. I recently learned that all of North Texas only has about 30 snowplows and other snow clearing equipment.

Needless to say, transportation has been treacherous. Folks here don’t know how to drive on wintry precipitation and don’t really understand black ice so there have been a lot of collisions. You probably heard about the 133 vehicle pileup in Fort Worth but might not have heard about the 26 car pileup near where I live. Then we had another round of freezing rain and were back to square one.

I haven’t left my house since all of this began, so I’m safe. I have friends who haven’t been so lucky, either because they are first responders or work in grocery stores.

✅ Gasoline

As I mentioned earlier, this has impacted our supply chain so supplies of gasoline as our local gas stations are quickly running out. Out of pure dumb luck, I topped off my tank a few days prior to all of this so I’m good to go.

❌ Work

The university has been closed all week.

😡 Mood

All of this wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted. Now-infamously back in 2011 the last time this happened. Rather than babble, I’ll just include these three links which summarize how I feel:

📷 Photos

This is what it looks like outside my front door as I write this.

This is me, staying warm, typing this email.

And this is what life around Austin looks like currently:

Conclusion

I’m not going to say that I’m “fine” or “okay,” but I am doing better than a lot of folks I know. If things get worse I have friends with whom I can stay and, as a native New Yorker, I’m fairly confident in my abilities to drive under these conditions. If not, I have friends whom I can call (one, in particular, has a 4x4 truck and has been acting as a shuttle service to get doctors and nurses to and from the hospital).

I fully expect that I’ll be able to make it into the next week when things will start returning to normal when everything thaws.