Heading into the Weekend, Winter Storm Landon Still Leaves Many in the Dark

Danielle Thomas already had so much on her mind that the winter storm barreling toward North Texas barely registered. Her grandmother had died nearly a month earlier, and on the same day, she lost her job as an instructor at a Dallas kickboxing studio.

She was busy grappling with the stress of unemployment and wracked with grief, so reports of an approaching storm didn’t settle in until Tuesday. Then the memories came rushing back – memories of last year’s deadly Winter Storm Uri, which devastated Texas’ electric grid and left Thomas and some millions Texans without power for days on end.

“I had no power for four days, no water for like three,” she said. Thomas ended up melting snow and pouring it into her toilet to flush and trudging through the blistering cold to wherever she could buy drinking water nearby.

Thomas snapped into action Tuesday night, figuring she would stock her Uptown Dallas apartment with some essentials. At the grocery store, “everyone was just really nervous again,” Thomas said. By the time she got there, there was no drinking water left, and many of the aisles had already been “picked clean.” She bought the few bottles of sparkling water that remained and hunkered down.

By Thursday morning, about 70,000 Texans were without power, according to the Hill. Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of emergency in Dallas and 16 other Texas counties later that afternoon.

Many of those outages didn’t last nearly as long as last year, though. By Friday afternoon, ERCOT reported only 10,783 outages. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s power grid, reported that peak stress on the system had passed by Friday morning. So far, the strain on Texas’ grid has been far less than it was during Winter Storm Uri.

In the press, Abbott trumpeted improvements made to the grid on Friday. “The Texas electric grid is more reliable and more resilient than it has ever been,” he said. The grid has held up, and there’s no doubt this year’s storm was less severe, but toppled power lines and other weather-related damages have still hit some areas.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins also signed a declaration of disaster this week. “This will speed help to first responders in the event our supplies or personnel are overstretched,” he wrote on Twitter, explaining that the main issues were “fallen tree limbs” rather than “brown outs or grid issues.”

Thomas even thought she might come through this storm unscathed. Then at noon on Friday, her North Dallas apartment complex lost power. Her water stopped working too. She and her neighbors have been checking in on each other, making sure everyone has what they need until the lights come back on, she said.

But even as ERCOT reports stable grid conditions statewide and declining outages, Thomas and others in her apartment block were weathering yet another night without lights or heat as the temperatures dipped into the low twenties Friday evening.

Roads across North Texas remained treacherous heading into the weekend. And despite assurances from Public Utilities Commission Chairman Peter Lake that the grid is better equipped for winter weather this year, the new state rules setting weatherization standards haven’t gone into effect yet.

From her frigid Dallas apartment Thomas acknowledged that this year wasn’t nearly as bad as last. “But still, just, as a state, it feels like we’re right back there again,” Thomas said. “I really hoped we’d be more prepared than this.”