Living just North of the Red River here in Okie Country there have been plenty of times I've been jealous of Texas. NOT THIS TIME! Holy Geez Louise!
We have quite a few nearly empty grocery store shelves up here in Oklahoma. I visited one of our local grocery stores earlier this evening and I was a bit surprised which aisles were the most empty (the ones with soup and ramen were cleaned out). On the very bright side we at least have electricity pretty much state-wide. There are some serious water service outages in localized places. The town of Frederick near Lawton won't have water until Sunday at the earliest due to a pipe break that flooded equipment in a pumping station. Thousands of homes and businesses across the region have leaking or burst pipes from record setting cold. Lawton set a new all time record low of -12°F early Tuesday morning. We were below zero for the third time this week early Friday morning. Lawton was below freezing for a record setting 274 hours straight until Friday afternoon. The previous record was 96 hours below freezing. This polar vortex was one for the history books.
Personally, several of my co-workers are dealing with catastrophic plumbing issues. Our sales manager hasn't had running water in his house since the start of the work week. He'll only know where his pipes are leaking or burst when they finally thaw. I'm doing alright only by the virtue of having to watch-dog a laundry room in my garage that's prone to freeze. So I've been up and down through the nights, as if I'm taking care of a newborn baby, just trying to keep appliances and pipes from freezing. But my pipes are 100% good thanks to that round the clock attention. The big mistake so many have made was assuming their new-ish plumbing was up to the challenge and sleeping through the night, only to wake up and find things frozen.
There is probably going to be a lot of hell to pay in Texas for this power and water supply debacle. Oklahoma isn't so much different from Texas in terms of politics. But very much unlike Texas, Oklahoma is connected directly to the rest of the nation's electrical power grid. Oklahoma is part of the nation's Eastern power grid. There is a Western power grid for Western states. And then there is Texas, all separate unto itself, in part to avoid Federal regulations and oversight. We had one "planned" (or deliberate) rolling blackout here in Lawton early Monday afternoon. That was in response to grid strain happening in other neighboring states. The blackout lasted an hour. We've had power ever since. Texas has fared a lot worse. It's grimly funny how certain lawmakers attempted to blame the blackouts on frozen wind turbines when the real culprit was "freeze-outs" in the state's natural gas network.
We have quite a few nearly empty grocery store shelves up here in Oklahoma. I visited one of our local grocery stores earlier this evening and I was a bit surprised which aisles were the most empty (the ones with soup and ramen were cleaned out). On the very bright side we at least have electricity pretty much state-wide. There are some serious water service outages in localized places. The town of Frederick near Lawton won't have water until Sunday at the earliest due to a pipe break that flooded equipment in a pumping station. Thousands of homes and businesses across the region have leaking or burst pipes from record setting cold. Lawton set a new all time record low of -12°F early Tuesday morning. We were below zero for the third time this week early Friday morning. Lawton was below freezing for a record setting 274 hours straight until Friday afternoon. The previous record was 96 hours below freezing. This polar vortex was one for the history books.
Personally, several of my co-workers are dealing with catastrophic plumbing issues. Our sales manager hasn't had running water in his house since the start of the work week. He'll only know where his pipes are leaking or burst when they finally thaw. I'm doing alright only by the virtue of having to watch-dog a laundry room in my garage that's prone to freeze. So I've been up and down through the nights, as if I'm taking care of a newborn baby, just trying to keep appliances and pipes from freezing. But my pipes are 100% good thanks to that round the clock attention. The big mistake so many have made was assuming their new-ish plumbing was up to the challenge and sleeping through the night, only to wake up and find things frozen.
There is probably going to be a lot of hell to pay in Texas for this power and water supply debacle. Oklahoma isn't so much different from Texas in terms of politics. But very much unlike Texas, Oklahoma is connected directly to the rest of the nation's electrical power grid. Oklahoma is part of the nation's Eastern power grid. There is a Western power grid for Western states. And then there is Texas, all separate unto itself, in part to avoid Federal regulations and oversight. We had one "planned" (or deliberate) rolling blackout here in Lawton early Monday afternoon. That was in response to grid strain happening in other neighboring states. The blackout lasted an hour. We've had power ever since. Texas has fared a lot worse. It's grimly funny how certain lawmakers attempted to blame the blackouts on frozen wind turbines when the real culprit was "freeze-outs" in the state's natural gas network.
