San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Lack of info stymied storm response
Records show a city preparing — but not for record cold, mass outages
Two days after an arctic storm began its weeklong assault on San Antonio, the head of the city-owned electric utility gave an optimistic prognosis: With warmer temperatures on the way, power outages would be over by the end of the week.
“If we’re lucky, I think we’ll start seeing some improvements tomorrow,”
Paula Gold-Williams, CEO of CPS Energy, told reporters Feb. 16. “But it will be dicey between now and late tomorrow.”
Hours later, utility officials had a different message for city leaders: Texas was on the verge of a catastrophic power failure.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s power grid, “is at a critical stage and in jeopardy of losing the grid,” CPS officials said in a memo sent that evening to Mayor Ron Nirenberg, City Council members and city administrators.
The situation was so dire that even hospitals and other critical infrastructure, exempt from the managed blackouts up to that point, likely would have their power cut to save the grid from collapse, CPS said.
The starkly different assessments illustrate gaps in what city officials knew about the unfolding crisis: a string of information outages that hindered officials in responding to the blackouts and in communicating with constituents shivering in darkened homes.
Internal memos and emails obtained by the San Antonio Express-News show that before the storm hit Feb. 14, city officials were preparing for icy roads, downed electrical lines and limited blackouts
— but not for the record-setting low temperatures and extensive power outages that gripped the region.
San Antonio lagged other major Texas cities in establishing mass warming shelters for residents without power, the memos show.
The city’s handling of the crisis is the subject of three investigations. One will be conducted by a committee appointed by Nirenberg. It will explore how the city and its water and electric utilities “got in this situation and what can be done to be better prepared for the future,” the mayor said in a memo.
The seven-member panel — led by former City Councilman Reed Williams, a retired oilman and former San Antonio Water System trustee — held its first meeting Friday.
“It’s not necessarily a bunch of Saturday morning quarterbacking,” Williams said. “But the reality is the facts will speak for themselves. We just have to get them out and get them understood.”
Nirenberg said ERCOT’s failure to warn local officials that outages were inevitable created a “perfect storm” that waylaid the city’s crisis response.
“Had we received that kind of warning, the emphasis of our preparations would have shifted,” Nirenberg said.
Seizing on public disillusionment with CPS, former Councilman Greg Brockhouse, Nirenberg’s main rival in the May 1 mayoral election, called for Gold-Williams to resign and for an overhaul of the electric utility.
“CPS Energy’s response to the devastating winter storm is at best insufficient and at worst completely tone-deaf,” Brockhouse said.
Nirenberg is taking a more cautious approach, saying he wants to await the outcome of the various investigations. “If changes need to be made, we will make changes,” he said.
Internal communication
Two days before the storm hit San Antonio, local agencies made normal preparations for a freeze, according to memos from the city’s Office of Emergency Management.
City, county and state road crews spread de-icing material on roads, erected barricades and closed flyovers.
The city’s Department of Human Services coordinated with the Salvation Army and Haven for Hope to bring the homeless into shelters.
The Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council, which coordinates emergency medical services for the region, sent reminders
to hospitals to review their preparations for extreme weather.
ERCOT told energy providers Feb. 11 that it expected recordhigh demand for power.
CPS wasn’t sounding the alarm — yet.
The utility had taken steps to keep its generating facilities running in freezing temperatures. It positioned crews to respond to downed power lines and localized outages, the utility told city leaders in a Feb. 12 memo.
CPS asked customers to reduce their energy use voluntarily, and it communicated to city leaders that it was prepared to handle small-scale outages.
“Electric grid conditions are operating as normal, asking customers to voluntarily conserve energy,” the utility said in a Feb. 13 memo.
On Feb. 14, as the storm descended, the tone began to shift. CPS warned the city Office of Emergency Management that demand for energy would grow as temperatures dropped — and would likely outstrip supply that night.
“The models are showing that the energy demand could exceed the supply around 10:00 PM tonight,” CPS wrote in a memo that evening. “There are possibilities for outages. Rotating outages are only implemented as a last resort.”
Hours later, in the early morning of Feb. 15, ERCOT ordered CPS and other Texas utilities to institute “rolling outages” to protect the statewide grid.
The result: days of widespread blackouts and water outages. Residents vented frustration with city officials for failing to communicate the severity of the crisis in real time.
In a memo Feb. 15, CPS told city officials that ERCOT had “called for rotating outages starting at 1:30 AM this morning. The shortage (of power) is significant . ... ERCOT is asking for 20 percent of the San Antonio-area load.”
Exacerbating the power shortage was that the freeze had shut down generating plants across the state, CPS told local officials in the same memo.
The fallout from the outages was growing. Officials scrambled to make sure hospitals and clinics had power as well as homebound seniors and nursing homes.
For the most part, hospitals were able to switch to backup generators, said Eric Epley, executive director of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council. But six hospitals — including Children’s Hospital of San Antonio — saw a drop in water pressure, San Antonio Water System officials acknowledged.
Residents in low-income apartments operated by the San Antonio Housing Authority experienced water shortages as a main broke, the Feb. 15 memo said.
SAWS’ pumping stations were idled by rolling outages.
CPS told leaders to brace for the possibility that blackouts would continue into the next day. The utility said it would tell residents to prepare to deal with outages “long-term.”
But the utility said that at least “critical facilities” such as hospitals and government buildings would not lose power.
That changed the next day.
In a Feb. 16 memo, CPS said “there is a very high probability that all customers including critical customers such as hospitals will be affected.”
CPS told its emergency crews working on restoring power to stand down “until this emergency has improved.” The utility was managing localized blackouts while it tried to get large electricity users such as H-E-B and government buildings to cut their consumption and rely on generators.
As the city dealt with a second day of significant outages, homeless shelters began to lose power and water.
SAWS was trying to fix a drop in water pressure “due to a combination of suspected water main breaks, frozen instrumentation and rolling brownouts.”
Warming shelters
City leaders were slow to set up their own mass warming shelter for the general public.
Austin had a pair of shelters ready to go three days before the storm hit. Dallas opened the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center to the homeless Feb. 12 — and made it available to the broader public three days later.
Starting Feb. 14, Houston officials allowed residents without heat and power to ride out the storm at the George R. Brown Convention Center.
San Antonio officials didn’t set up a mass warming shelter at the Henry B. González Convention Center until Feb. 16 — the second day of mass power outages.
That frustrated District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño, who had proposed using the Convention Center as a warming center for the homeless in December.
In a Dec. 9 email to City Manager Erik Walsh, Treviño said the center’s “many unused exhibition halls could be used for coldweather shelter. There are plenty
of restrooms. I still do not have any answers to what we will be doing for homeless as we head into winter.”
Walsh expressed reservations at the time. The city’s Department of Human Services already had plans for shelters in case of cold weather, he said. Plus, Haven for Hope and the Salvation Army “have capacity” to shelter the homeless.
“Putting people directly into hotels without care, support and assistance could create additional issues,” Walsh wrote.
Treviño said he found Walsh’s response lacking — in December and even more so when the February storm hit.
“It appears that it only got taken seriously when the issue of power basically made our entire city vulnerable,” Treviño said.
Walsh, asked for comment, said the city and social service agencies housed about 400 people per night at shelters around town and about 500 at the Convention Center during the storm.
The city worked with homeless service providers to transport homeless people to shelters and hotels ahead of the storm, Walsh said. The city also bought downtown hotel rooms for San Antonio Housing Authority residents who lost power and for people who needed electricity to operate medical devices, he said.
Walsh said the need for a mass warming center became clear when San Antonio saw its second day of widespread outages Feb. 16. City officials had been concerned that any location they selected for a mass shelter could lose power. The city made arrangements with CPS to ensure the electricity would stay on at the Convention Center.
“I think our strategy for those on the street worked well,” Walsh said. “I’m extremely proud of the work that Human Services did with all of our partners. Frankly, I think they were seamless in terms of that outreach, working together to place people into shelters.”
Communication with public
One issue likely to draw special scrutiny is whether city officials and utility leaders did enough to warn residents and keep them informed as the crisis unfolded.
“When there is danger hurtling their way, we make sure that they
know it’s coming and what it is that we expect them to do,” District 8 Councilman Manny Peláez said. “In this instance, I felt there was not enough of that. And I have yet to meet a San Antonian who thinks that the warnings were adequate.”
Council members Adriana Rocha Garcia and Clayton Perry have questioned why the city didn’t use the city-county emergency alert system to send updates to residents’ phones. The system was used to send alerts about worsening road conditions as the winter weather moved in Feb. 14 — but it went silent after that.
“Here, we had a massive failure and we didn’t use it,” Perry said.
Walsh said it was unclear what the city would have told residents in an emergency alert, given that city officials themselves did not know how long the rolling outages would last or what areas they would affect.
CPS officials said they issued warnings about potential outages and urged customers to conserve energy in news releases and social media posts — including Feb. 14, the day before mass blackouts began. The utility sent robocalls to more than 600,000 customers asking them to reduce power usage, CPS spokeswoman Melissa Sorola said.
CPS follows guidelines from ERCOT that tie the utility’s crisis communications “to the level of energy reserves” on the grid, Sorola said. The purpose, she said, is “to ensure accuracy in what we are telling the community so that we don’t cause any undue panic or extreme pricing signals in the market.”
Still, the utility has “identified gaps in our tools and will work to make sure these are addressed to continue to maximize our reach to our customers,” Sorola said.
For Councilwoman Garcia, some of those gaps are already clear. Some constituents in her South Side district lack access to the internet, she said. Many rely on television to get their information.
“Something of this magnitude obviously wasn’t expected by anyone,” Garcia said. “I think it caught a lot of people by surprise, unfortunately. We’re going to have to do a better job of communicating.”