Sometime in the middle of last week, the weatherman started warning us of temperatures that could be unusually cold coming our way. By Friday, the message had intensified. The temperature next week would be colder than anything seen in Houston for decades.
As I was heading home on Friday night, my boss told me that Monday and Tuesday--the days when the temperatures would be the lowest, and a storm would be moving in as well--I would be expected to work twelve-hour shifts because we would probably be doing around the clock coverage.
I talked with one of my co-workers just before heading out the door for the weekend, and I told him I was considering bringing a sleeping bag in to the station and spending the night when the storm was at its worst, because I didn't want to have to drive on the roads when they were expected to be covered with ice.
The big story all that day had been the 133-car pile-up that had happened in Fort Worth, just a few hours to the north. They were already experiencing the inclement weather that was headed our way. That morning, during the morning rush hour traffic, the road had iced over. One car had crashed. The cars behind had been unable to stop due to the ice and crashed into the first one. For several long minutes, one car after another lost control on the ice, ramming into the ever-increasing pile. Several people died, dozens were injured, and the helicopter video of the aftermath was heart-rending to see. Of course, editing that video together and serving it up so that people's hearts were rent had been my duty all that day.
This event had at least put a healthy fear of driving on ice into the minds of everyone who was still in the crosshairs of the oncoming storm. No one wanted to be a part of something like this. My co-worker completely agreed with me on that.
"Okay," he said, as we parted ways, "I guess I'll see you Sunday night."
Wait...Sunday night? I didn't have to work until Monday at 2:00 PM, why would I come in on Sunday night. As I tried to winterize our home over the next two days, I looked closer at the timeline of the weather coming our way. Sunday was when the rain and the cold were expected to begin. My co-worker was right. If I waited until Monday to try to drive, the conditions would be very dangerous, and I might end up in a situation like the picture above.
I did have to go in for work early. If I didn't, it was likely that I would wind up never making it to work at all. That's what happened to me during Hurricane Harvey. All the roads were flooded, so I never made it in to work to help with the coverage, and I still have guilt because of that. I didn't want to fail to do my part during another historic weather emergency. So, Sunday morning, I packed everything I would need into a suitcase, loaded it into my car, and got on the road as early as I could to avoid the ice and sleet.
Before leaving, I made certain to go to my wife and each one of the kids and give them a hug and tell them that I loved them. That Fort Worth accident had really spooked me. It made me stop and consider that for all I knew, this could be the last time they'd ever see me. I wanted it to be something they'd look back on and remember fondly. It would be nice to know that they could say to themselves that the last words I said to them were that I loved them.
It's kind of silly, I know. Tomorrow is never guaranteed. Any day that I walk out the door for work could be my last. But for some reason, that Fort Worth accident I suppose, it felt so much more likely this time, so I had to go out of my way to say goodbye.
I drove to work with my heart in my throat the whole time. It had begun raining about an hour before I was ready to leave, so the streets were nice and wet. I watched my thermometer as I went, and it hung right around 34 degrees (that's about +1 degrees Celsius for my non-American readership). If it got much colder, all this moisture on the streets could turn to ice. On top of that, the freeway I was driving on was elevated, so it was basically one extremely long bridge, and everybody's seen these signs before:
I drove very slow and very careful, because I was very aware that ice can't always be seen. I considered staying to the surface streets the whole time in an attempt to avoid overpasses, but after a few minutes on the feeder road, I had to go up on an overpass...turns out sometimes the freeway goes overhead, but sometimes the surface street is the one that goes overhead. If I was damned if I did or damned if I didn't, then I figured the faster of the two options was the best choice. At least then I could arrive quicker, and likely avoid the freeze. Every moment we marched closer to dark was a moment closer to freezing.
I was so relieved when I finally pulled into the parking lot at my station, and could breathe easy again. My heart steadily settled back into its proper position, and I walked into the station to see what was going on. I suspected that everyone there would look up as I arrived and say, "You don't work until tomorrow at 2:00 PM, what are you doing here?" I'd have to sheepishly explain to them how worried I was, and that I'd decided to go way over the top with my safety protocols, and come into work twenty hours early, just in case.
Instead, the first guy I met on my way in the door said, "All right, Big Anklevich! You ready for the party?"
Inside, I discovered dozens of people were already there with the same idea. Some people, I suppose they were the ones who would be starting their shifts at 2:00 AM instead of 2:00 PM, were already in their makeshift beds under the table in the conference room, snoozing away. In fact, I had to hustle in with all my gear, and claim my spot before all the best places were taken.
I think I managed to get the best spot, too. I tossed my mattress on the floor of the wellness room. The main purpose of the wellness room is a comfortable, private place for nursing mothers to be able to pump their breast milk while at work. However, I know a guy who goes in there frequently to be in a quiet place to meditate. So, it can have several uses. Luckily, there was no one presently that still needed the room to pump breast milk, because they would have a good reason to throw me out of the room in the middle of the night if they needed to. That wouldn't be so great for me.
I set up my bed and was ready to go.
The best part about my room was the lock on the door. I could push that latch, and everybody knew to keep out.
And since the entire point of the room was privacy, the door was completely solid. Most of the doors in the other offices throughout the building had windows down the middle, and people had to tape paper over the glass to get some privacy.
For most of Sunday evening, I sat around at my desk, the one in the newsroom where I usually worked, and surfed the internet, watched YouTube videos, and organized pictures that I'd scanned on Google Photos. Eventually, I went back up to my digs, read a book, and then went to sleep.
Another big plus of the wellness room is that it is nearly completely black when the lights are out. Might as well have been a cave. I slept like the dead in there. My mattress was just an old cushion for the chaise lounge that we used to have on our old couch. It was basically the same as sleeping on the couch all night long, but I found it to be completely comfortable.
My other option would have been to bring an air mattress, but we've had bad luck with those recently. They always seem to deflate overnight, leaving your back aching from the unnatural sleeping position. So, I opted for the couch cushion, and I think I made the right choice.
The storm was turning ugly outside, but I didn't know, because I was in a room with no windows well protected from outside.
When I woke up Monday morning, I opened up my weather app on my phone and was amazed by what it had to tell me.
It was 18 degrees outside. 18 degrees! (That is about -8 degrees celsius, my dear non-American readers). And that was at 9:30 in the morning, when it had already warmed up a little bit. What had it been a few hours earlier when it had reached its nadir?
I know, that's not all that cold for a lot of people reading this blog post. Lots of places around the world hit this temperature with regularity each winter, but Houston isn't one of them. We're lucky to reach freezing most winters. We live in a near-tropical climate. In the US, only Florida has major cities at lower latitudes than us. Intense heat is usually our problem, not cold. This couldn't be more unusual.
I wanted to get up and head outside to see what the night had brought to us, but I looked like this:
And I'd screwed up when packing for this little stay-cation, and forgotten to put a hat in my bag. Luckily, the wellness room had one more advantage over the rest of the accommodations at the station, it was also equipped with a sink. I didn't even have to go out to the bathroom to get water on my comb to tame my bedhead.
Quickly, I was out the door and headed to the parking lot to get a load of what a real winter looked like.
There was snow everywhere, and it was bitterly cold out there.
The parking lot was treacherous to walk on, much less to drive, so I was really grateful that I decided to come early and spend the night. I couldn't imagine how many accidents we would be reporting on once I started my shift that afternoon.
Interestingly, this isn't the first time I've seen snow in Houston. Back in 2017, it snowed here.
It was a mere dusting of fluffy wet snow that melted within an hour of me taking that picture of it. The stuff that had fallen overnight this year was icy, dry snow, the kind of powder that is great for skiing or sliding out of control on a raised freeway.
I got a hold of my wife on the phone a little later, and she told me how things had gone for us. She'd kept the faucets dribbling the whole night through, and none of our pipes had burst on us yet. Our power was still on as well, so she couldn't complain about that.
There was snow on the ground out there, and she sent me this picture she took out of our bedroom window.
Looks pleasant, huh? Wouldn't you like to just go out and plop into those lounge chairs to soak up some rays?
The station provided us with all of our meals this whole week, but I woke up too late to manage to grab any breakfast. I got some lunch, though, so I couldn't complain. I didn't even need it, because I'd cooked a bunch of food for myself and brought it with me. The Boy Scout motto is "Be Prepared" after all. It was nice all the same, though.
I looked into getting a shower, but there was only one men's bathroom and one women's bathroom equipped with a shower in the whole building, and the important people that appear on air, like the anchors and the reporters were keeping them totally occupied, so I had to head to my shift smelling like someone who'd spent the night on couch cushions on the floor.
We did several hours more of news than we usually did, but we didn't go wall to wall surprisingly. When prime time rolled around, we bowed out, and allowed people to watch their favorite sitcoms, dramas, and reality shows, instead of bombarding them with more talk of just how cold it was outside.
The big story didn't turn out to be all of the car accidents. There were a few, but even when added all up, they paled in comparison to that one massive pile-up in Fort Worth. Instead, the big story turned out to be the fact that the power grid was not prepared for the weather. People losing power in an ice storm is definitely not unheard of. Ice on power lines or tree branches can add hundreds of pounds of weight. Lines snap or branches and trees fall, taking out the power to many, but that wasn't what our problem was in Houston.
Instead, there simply wasn't enough power to go around. Usage was obviously up, but power generation was down. Windmills were frozen and solar panels were covered in ice and snow, which caused a big drop in available power. Even the natural gas lines had frozen, cutting off the supply needed for many power plants to create electricity. Some plants weren't on to begin with, and iced over before they could be fired up. Supply was down, demand was up, and the whole thing broke to pieces.
Power had to be shut down all over the state to avoid more permanent damage to the power grid, and this left many people with no lights or heat right in the middle of the coldest time in decades. What we saw were stories similar to the ones I used to edit before I moved to Texas. There's always one or two each year, but during this disaster, there were hundreds all over the state.
Most common were the carbon monoxide poisonings. People were freezing, so they got desperate and brought their barbecue in the house to use as a fireplace, and without proper venting, it filled their house with carbon monoxide and poisoned the residents. Or they had a gas-powered generator, and they ran it inside their house or they didn't locate it far enough away from their house, and the carbon monixide exhaust filled the house and poisoned the residents. Or one family even decided to run their car in the garage as a way to try to warm up the house. Many people died, many more were in the hospital being treated and may not survive.
There also were several fires around town during the cold. Whenever we reported on them, the cause was not yet known, but judging from my past experience in Utah, I'd be willing to guarantee that they were caused by space heaters that were unattended, got knocked over, and started something on fire, eventually burning down the whole house.
It was a long, hard depressing day, but at 11:00 PM, the managers decided to call it quits. I was scheduled until 2:00 AM, but the last three hours weren't going to be necessary.
Just in case, I decided to go outside and start my car to make sure something hadn't frozen inside it. It started up fine, so that was a relief. The temperature on the car's thermometer was back at 18 degrees.
It's where I started the day, and where I ended it. I assume it got a little warmer than that during the afternoon, but probably not a whole lot warmer.
I snapped a few pictures of the decorative plants that adorned the front of the station.
I hate to say it, but I don't think these plants are coming back from treatment like this.
Look at those things encased in ice. That'll be that for those plants.
Looks like we needed a larger bit of protective cloth for them. Whoops.
Now that I was cleared to leave my shift, I headed upstairs to the wellness room, got in bed, and read my book that I'd brought. It was good, and I was in the very end of it, so I wound up reading until 2:00 AM when I finished it. It's not like I had things to do in the morning, so I figured it didn't matter if I stayed up late or not.
Tuesday morning, I got up, had some of the breakfast provided by the station, and then managed to get into the shower before someone else claimed it. I forgot to pack a towel, so I had to use one of my shirts to dry off. It was really nice to stand there under the hot water after not getting a shower the day before.
Eventually, I got back on shift, and started working on the news again. It was more of the same and then some. The power outages had now led to boil orders for all of the people in the area. The water system had been compromised, and it was likely to be dangerous to drink.
I talked to my wife about it, and she said it wasn't a big problem for us. For one, our water hadn't been turned off on us. Our pipes had survived another night without freezing, and water was still flowing from our faucets. We still had power as well, so we could use our stove to boil water. On top of that, we still had tons of bottled water in our hurricane preparedness stash, and we could just drink that instead if we wanted to.
That wasn't the case for a large portion of Houston, however. Pipes were bursting all over town. We were showing dozens of different cell phone videos that people had taken of their homes being destroyed by water pouring in through their ceilings from their shattered pipes. The damage looked to be very extreme.
The water leaks everywhere only exacerbated the water problems. The water supply lowered and sediment from the bottoms of the tanks started flowing out into people's sinks. Their water was coming out brown and nasty. Even boiling that wasn't going to be enough, probably.
Somehow, despite all of our usual preparation for hurricane season, tons of people had no water standing by. All sorts of water distribution efforts quickly began. Stacks and stacks of cases of bottled water were rushed in and handed out to those who needed them.
Others rushed out to the grocery stores to buy water. Long lines formed outside of the stores, wrapping around the buildings. The shelves were stripped bare, and not just of water. my wife went out to the store (not for water, but for something completely unrelated), and sent me these pictures.
Those are the areas where the meat, the milk, the eggs, the bread, and the cheese are sold at our local Walmart. As you can see, they're sold out, completely and utterly. Surprisingly, though, there was plenty of frozen vegetables left.
Not only that, but the lines at the few restaurants that were still operating were enormous. There were McDonald's restaurants, Whataburgers, Burger Kings and so on with hours-long lines for their drive-thru windows. They looked like what you might see at the grand opening of the first In-N-Out Burger in a new town. It was baffling, because who wants Burger King or McDonald's that bad?
It was hard to understand. How could everybody already be out of food? The storm and subsequent emergency had only been going on for a couple of days. Did these people not even have enough food in their fridge to last them a couple of days? Did they go to the grocery store every single night? Did they only ever eat at restaurants? How could things be this fragile?
Our emergency preparedness setup is not even all that robust. We could last a few weeks, maybe a few months, but we don't have the recommended year's supply, yet we make the rest of town look like a bunch of children born yesterday, I guess.
What was my wife actually doing at Walmart? Well, she was starting to get a little stir crazy. She was home the whole week through. She still had a lot of work to do from home by way of texts, calls, emails, Zoom, WhatsApp, and so forth, but after a few days home, she was desperate to do something productive. She's just that way.
She had already started spending some of her time working on the bathroom that she has been renovating for a while, removing the old tiles from the walls. Now she needed some supplies for that project, and she was there to grab them. Since she was there, she got a look at the empty shelves, and even managed to grab the last block of mozzarella cheese that had been hiding behind a box.
She worked on some other things while at home as well. Here is a picture of the seats that go on top of our barstools. She hated how they looked before, and they had started breaking as well, so she sanded them down and restained them.
Here's how the stools look now that she's done refinishing them.
I can't help but chuckle to see what she does when given an extra week off. She could have just sat back and enjoyed some shows on Netflix or something in between all the working from home that she had to do. She was putting in nearly a full day's work just with all the meetings she was attending on Zoom. Instead, she had to work when she wasn't working. I think that might qualify her as a work-a-holic.
My son was bored, and doing all sorts of crazy stuff to keep himself occupied. My wife was unable to handle the messes. He was either involved in some kind of elaborate craft project that involved a lot of paper, crayons, scissors, and more, or he was watching annoying YouTube videos of screaming gamers playing Minecraft. While she was at Walmart, she decided it would be worth the money to get him a Lego set that would occupy him for a while. She found a pretty decent one that wasn't too expensive, and put him to work assembling it.
It worked pretty well, and kept him happy for a while.
I stayed the night at the station again, because more rain was moving into town. The temperature had improved a little, but overnight it was dropping below freezing again. Several people had already started going home at night rather than sleeping on the floor at the office, but I live much further from work than most of my co-workers, and have to drive much longer on the raised freeways to get home, so I didn't dare risk it.
Of course, many people were coming back to sleep at work after having tried to go home. At work, at least, there was power and water, which meant heat, internet, and television. I knew several people who were even volunteering to work on their off-hours. It was better than being at home, they said.
It didn't stay like that forever, though. As I was heading to bed on that third night, our water suddenly fizzled out. Our station has a backup tank to supply water and keep a healthy working environment, however we had managed to use all that water up. Station engineers ran to the homes of those who lived nearby, and filled barrels with water, brought them back to the station, and left them in the bathrooms so that we would be able to flush away our doodoo.
Turns out that a lot of people don't know how that works, though, because the next morning, when I woke up and went to the bathroom, all the toilets were unflushed. There was a barrel full of water, and a bucket to pour it with right next to the toilet, but whoever had used the toilet hadn't even bothered to employ that water in its purpose. Since it was left to me, I took care of it.
I went down to the bathroom with the shower, because I had forgotten my comb in there when I'd taken my shower the day before. That bathroom was significantly grosser. It seemed like several people had used that toilet without bothering to dump in a bucket of water. I took care of it again, though I was afraid the toilet might be too full to flush. Luckily, I was wrong about that.
When I complained about this behavior to my co-workers later, I found that most of them didn't seem to have any understanding of how the mechanism even worked. They thought you had to hold the button down while dumping the water or something. I guess their lives were more sheltered than mine, and they were able to avoid ever having to learn how to flush a toilet with a bucket full of water.
After staying the night Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, I was pretty sure that the time was finally right for me to be able to go home. Before starting my shift on Wednesday, I packed all my belongings up, and put them in my car, so I would be ready to hit the road for home the second I was off work that night.
The news had become pretty repetitive by this point. We did stories about water and food distribution, stories about damage from broken pipes, stories about how hard it was to get a plumber right now, but most of all, stories about Ted Cruz.
I was so happy to get out the door that night when it was over. I drove slowly and carefully home. The roads were mostly fine. Here and there, they were wet. It hadn't rained, but there was still some ice against the center barriers that was melting now that the temperatures had risen sufficiently.
When I walked in the door, my two teenage daughters were still up watching TV, and they ran to me to give me a hug. It was wonderful to hug them again. Turned out that the last hugs I'd given weren't my final goodbye after all.
The weather was cold for several more days, dipping down into what the weather guy calls a hard freeze overnight for the next two nights. We had to keep our faucets dribbling just to ensure we didn't have any issues, but we got away unscathed in the end. The kids had an extra week off of school because of the weather, which made them happy. As far as I can tell, though, there was no damage to our house, and no real suffering endured by the family through it all.
I guess our plants didn't make it out that well, but that happened to everybody.
Don't know which, if any, of those plants will be coming back. Most of them I think are likely gone for good. Maybe the lemon tree will survive. We had a lemon tree when I was a kid that came back after a rough freeze.
The rest of the city, and indeed the rest of the state, will have a lot of work ahead of them to get everything back to normal, though. There was a large amount of damage from the weather. I heard one report estimate that it will be more costly than Hurricane Harvey was. I suppose that must be because the storm screwed things up statewide, instead just in a more concentrated area like Harvey did. That seems crazy to me, but I suppose it could be possible. There's only about seven million people in the Houston metro area, but there are more than 28 million in the whole state of Texas.
I guess the takeaway from this post is that I just wanted to tell you all that we're doing fine.
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