STUCK IN COLD: Loss of power, heat adds to stresses in areas already struggling
Willie Rios’ neighbors started calling just after 2 a.m. Monday.
They’d lost power — and their plumbing. Rios, a 40year-old City Council member from the city of South Houston, filled some buckets of water and headed for his pickup. At least with the water they’d be able to flush.
At the same time, Shanice Ardion was in the dark — at times relying on the flames from her gas stove to keep her four children warm.
By Tuesday, after more than 24 hours without power and hot water, hope was fleeting.
“My phones are dead,” Ardion said, shivering and her voice cracking at her Cuney Homes apartment — the public housing complex in Third Ward.
The brutal cold of the last few days has left most of Harris County fighting to stay warm.
In South Houston, approximately 85 percent of town lost power Monday, Rios said, leaving neighbors to check on neighbors and city officials scrambling to keep fundamental services running to its inhabitants.
And many residents at the Cuney Homes low-rise — known as “the Bricks” — on Tuesday morning complained of spoiling food, poor phone service and the inability to keep warm. Covering the windows with blankets, Ardion said, did not help with taming the cold.
In already stressed areas, the effects of the storm could not be buffered.
Ignoring experts’ warnings
At Cuney Homes, Ardion’s partner, Derrick Jones, paused to warm his hands over the stove burners. There was little difference in the temperature of the living room compared with outside.
Fire experts have long warned against using stoves to heat homes at the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. The Houston Fire Department responded to more than 90 carbon monoxiderelated calls, including two deaths, during the storm. Chief Samuel Peña expressed dismay at using gas burners for heat.
“They have to resort to these dangerous practices because they have no other options,” Peña said.
Ardion’s apartment and others like it — about 560 units built in 1939 — rapidly lost heat when the power came to a halt around 2 a.m. Monday. The power briefly returned around 3 p.m. but puttered out soon after.
With what phone battery remained, Ardion on Monday called housing management pleading for help.
“They didn’t answer the first time when I called them yesterday,” she said. When she finally reached someone, she was told, “We can’t do anything about it. It’s all CenterPoint Energy.”
Representatives from Houston Housing Authority — which operates Cuney Homes and eight other public housing developments — said resident councils have been “conducting well-being checks” at the complex.
“We are in touch with residents for particular and/or urgent needs,” HHA officials said in an email. “Now that it’s starting to get safer to move around the city, we are looking into distributing water and portable bathrooms to sites experiencing issues.”
Many residents, most of whom live below the poverty line, have since left to stay with friends or family — the lucky Houstonians still with power. Others, such as Ardion, had no choice but to hunker down and bundle up her kids, the youngest a 7-month-old girl.
Trying not to panic
Alicia Carr rushed out of her pitch-black home in pajama bottoms and holding together her knit sweater hoping that energy or housing officials had at long last come to check on them.
“I have a small child, a 6-yearold — she woke up coughing yesterday,” Carr said. “It’s cold in there.”
To make matters worse — the two of them, Carr said, were low on food. What food she had left was in the freezer — and the door was frozen shut. She did not have a car to leave and find a fresh meal, she said.
She was also without a working phone to keep up with news reports on when power could return, she said. CenterPoint Energy officials would later warn that the shortage — stemming from Electric Reliability Council of Texas directives — was out of their control and could “last several more days.”
“They knew a week ago that the weather was going to be bad,” Carr said, contending that the state and local energy companies could have done more to prepare.
“I’m trying not to panic, but it’s hard,” she said.
More woes in South Houston
As Rios was checking on residents, the town’s sewage treatment plant called. They didn’t have electricity. It had taken two hours to get the generator running. And with a historic cold snap hitting and no end in sight, they had only 11 hours of fuel.
“That’s when panic set in,” Rios said.
At the police station, officials had nervously nursed the department’s generator, which drained some 1,000 gallons of fuel over 26 hours.
“You gotta keep power on in the building to take those calls,” South Houston Police Capt. Jon Laird said.
Rios has lived in South Houston his whole life. The house he lives in now sits seven blocks from his childhood home. The town, he said, is the type of place where most people know each other by their first name — and where city officials end up taking calls from many constituents who are also personal friends.
All morning, Rios drove across town — past the mobile homes on Michigan Street, checking on neighbors and friends.
He stopped by the home of Rick Gonzales, who’d woken up to discover his water pipes were frozen solid.
The two crouched by an exterior pipe, ripping off some insulation, then warming the pipe with a heater, until Rios heard a soft “thunk” as the ice inside gave way.
“There it goes,” he said. South Houston is home to some 20,000 residents. Its median income hovers at about $46,000 per household, census records show. Many inhabitants live in mobile homes, as Rios did when he was younger.
“Imagine snow on there, and the lights out,” he said, gesturing at a line of mobile homes while driving to check on a neighbor. “You’ve got walls made of twoby-fours and some shingles ... and that’s all you got.”
The town doesn’t have the same resources as its more affluent neighbors, Rios said, but he has never imagined living anywhere else. He lives a few blocks from the house he grew up in.
A few streets away, he paused at Norma Davila’s home. The elderly woman’s daughter had messaged him, asking to check on her.
“We’re fine!” Davila called, shuffling outside.
They chatted briefly — did she have electricity? Yes. Water? Yes.
And she had Princess, her white-and-brown pit bull.
“She’s my heater,” Davila joked, gesturing at the inquisitive pup.
Elsewhere, residents such as Silvia Gomez were battling frozen pipes. Gomez had returned to her home on H Street to find burst water pipes and her home filled with 5 inches of water.
“It all fell through the ceiling,” she said, point up at her attic. She and her neighbors spent hours sweeping water out of the house and using leaf blowers to try to dry out the building as much as possible. Outside, it soon froze.
At the waste treatment plant, Fred Gonzales said employees had fanned out to pumping stations across the city to keep generators from freezing.
Still, two pumps failed, forcing them to run lines directly into maintenance holes to prevent backups in residents’ homes.
Power returns
On Tuesday morning, the power was finally back on — at least temporarily — after a hairraising 26 hours. A tanker had topped off 900 gallons of diesel fuel at the plant, leaving them with enough for two to three days.
“We were having a hard time getting fuel,” Gonzales said. “That’s particularly scary. Without fuel, this plant shuts down. That’s chaos.”
The treatment plant serves all of the town’s water and waste, he said. Sanitation workers spent frigid nights running emergency generators to prevent pumps from freezing — before the icy temperatures knocked two offline.
The weather was so cold that Leo Nunez’s tools — a pry bar, wrench and hammer — froze in a bucket of water, he said, and they had to melt the ice just to retrieve their tools.
Sanitation workers labored in shifts, because after a few minutes, the icy water made their hands go numb.
About 9:30 a.m., a fuel tanker arrived.
Enough for three days, if necessary, Rios estimated.
“It’s a blessing,” he said.
At the waste treatment plant, Nunez and the other employees were watching as another evening of icy weather loomed.
“We’re used to the heat,” he said. “But when it comes to the citizens, we got to adapt real fast.”
“They have to resort to these dangerous practices because they have no other options.”
Fire Chief Samuel Peña, on people risking carbon monoxide poisoning to stay warm