Month: February 2021

A Letter from Williamson County, Texas: Winter, 2021

Dearest Cousin, 

The experience washing dishes in a gallon of tepid snowmelt was less than satisfactory. I fear we may perish of some vile illness induced by the crusted and rotted scraps of food we were unable to remove from the silverware. 

We returned to the back 40 to fetch more snow. We were required to chop through a thick rind of ice before we could harvest the snow underneath. It was cold and wretched labor. Two gallons of snow renders barely two quarts of water. I dread the effort but Poo Pourri can do only so much. We must flush the toilets today! 

Alas! The good whisky will not outlast the freeze but I discovered a partial bottle of cheap Irish in the recesses of the cupboard. We will persevere. 

Please inform me of your situation, and assure us of the health and safety of you and yours. 

Your Cousin

I took a shower this morning. It was the second day in a row that I did so and I felt a bit guilty, but only a bit.

Like a lot of you, we didn’t have running water for much of last week. We still can’t drink it but we can bathe, and wash dishes and clothes. This is important because it means that none of the water pipes in this 100-year old house burst during the freeze. It also means that we had power to heat the water — another luxury we were denied for much of last week.

Let’s not even talk about the trauma inflicted by the lack of internet service.

I must admit that standing under a stream of hot water was delicious and more than a little indulgent.

It almost let me forget about last week. Almost.

But, I didn’t forget about it, nor my white-hot anger that citizens of the most energy rich state in the most advanced country in the world had to endure a killing freeze without electricity and, for all too many of us, water.

Friends, you’ve already heard our elected leaders, along with legions of keyboard commandos,  try to pin this debacle on the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). That’s the private non-profit group in Taylor that manages our electric grid.

It’s a red herring. Our elected leaders are, once again, trying to avoid accountability. Many ERCOT heads will roll, for sure, and some probably deserve it, but the system is flawed … and ERCOT is toothless. It has no authority to regulate energy providers. None. All ERCOT can do is “suggest” measures.

The problem we faced last week is a structural issue. It’s not just a matter of winterizing natural gas lines or resurrecting a few coal-fired plants, or putting anti-freeze equipment on some wind turbines, though all of this will help. 

Our energy system was built by the Texas Legislature in the late 1990s, fueled by oil lobby money, around an Enron pipe dream designed to maximize profits, disincentivize reinvestment, and avoid regulation and consumer protections.

Yes. That Enron. Even after Enron went down, our legislators deregulated in 2002. Because, oil company profits and, I suppose, freedom.

If you don’t remember Enron, Google it. It’s horrifying, one of the worst examples of capitalistic excess you’ll ever run across. The Wolf of Wall Street was a piker compared to those pirates.

Another good source of information is the autopsy of the 2011 storm. You know, the storm that showed our lawmakers — the only people who can regulate our energy market — that what we faced last week was not that far fetched.

That report is dry but the bare handful of providers who took that it to heart run the some of power plants who carried the load Monday and Tuesday. They just couldn’t produce enough juice to carry the entire load. The recommendations begin on page 195 and run about 100 pages.

Yeah, blame game won’t help because the very people who put this into motion are the only ones who can fix it, if they will. Sadly, the Texas Legislature has a poor track record of investigating itself.

In many ways, what we saw this week is a feature of our energy market, not a bug.

And, let’s just put this out there … because of our deregulated market, many people in Texas will face electric bills in the thousands, even though they had no electricity for much of the week.

This is ALSO a feature, not a bug.

My most recent podcast, in which I interviewed State Rep. James Talarico, dealt with this issue. You can find it, and all our previous episodes, on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts and iHeart Radio … or, at this link.

Perhaps it’s best that I write this today rather than last week when my outrage meter was pegged at 11 and I was so put out with Williamson County that I was literally red in the face.

If you’ve tried to get a coronavirus vaccine, you know that the process can seem random and arbitrary. And difficult. Getting through to the county’s vaccine help line can seem pretty random, too. Getting registered on the proper website can also seem pretty random.

A note to me from an 80-year old Cedar Park couple, desperate to get on a waiting list — any wait list — focused my ire, as did the lack of useful response from every single county official to whom I reached out for help.

I lost some sleep Thursday worrying about that couple.

I know how difficult this is but we’ve had months to prepare. We knew back in December that there wouldn’t be enough of the vaccine to go around. What did they think would happen when the vaccine was released to people other than first responders and frontline medical personnel? If they didn’t expect thousands upon thousands of people logging on to wait list websites or calling the vaccine hotline every day, what were they thinking?

Then, I remembered. Right before Christmas, Gov. Greg Abbott and his advisors abruptly opened vaccinations to those of us who are in Phase 1B because they misread the data and accused hospitals and pharmacies of letting doses of the vaccine languish on their shelves.

They were wrong, of course, but the governor couldn’t (or wouldn’t) walk it back. Vaccines weren’t going unused. There was a massive lag in the data — largely because providers had trouble with the creaky software the state used to track vaccinations — and every dose on a pharmacy shelf was committed.

But, that opened the floodgate and local officials dutifully amplified the governor’s decree that those of us who fell into Phase 1B should call their pharmacy or their doctors and get a shot before the vaccines expired.

I got a copy of the vaccine allocation list and began calling around, just to see who had doses to spare. The general reply was something along the lines of, “What?!”

I relayed that response to the county health department and they confirmed that no local health care provider had excess vaccines. They were as confused as I.

With his sudden announcement, the governor botched any hope that local officials and hospitals would have the ability to stand up a glitch-free vaccination rollout.

Like many of you, I put myself on every waiting list I could find, and forwarded links for those lists to my 80-some year old mom.

It all seems pretty random. It is pretty random.

I’ve been told that, as chaotic as WilCo’s response appears from this end, it is (or was) absolute madness behind the scenes. How many times did you call the vaccine help line last week before a live human being answered the phone? I called 30 times over three days.

I contacted that Cedar Park couple on Friday. Some friends had helped them get an appointment for the vaccine on Saturday through Austin Public Health. They reported to me on Sunday that they had indeed gotten their first doses of vaccine.

Pretty random but, whew.

I don’t think my mom has her appointment yet but our local provider called me and my wife Thursday and offered us a pair of doses. They had a limited number and some people failed to keep their appointment.

Again, pretty random. We just happened to be in the position we could dash over to the doctor’s office in time to snap up a couple of unclaimed doses.

I remain frustrated by this mess. There is not enough vaccine to go around and our priorities are a bit skewed — neither that 80 year old couple nor my mother should lack vaccinations, and the fact that essential groups like teachers and grocery store clerks can’t even get in line is reprehensible.

But, that’s not all the county’s fault. I can fault them for muddied communications — and that aspect of the county’s response has been all over the map — and not having a plan to register its residents but, in all fairness, the state put the county in a deep hole from the outset.