Storm exposes myth of Texas miracle
We merely ask our leaders for competence. We ask that your policies stop killing people.
Texans long ago became accustomed to floods and droughts, wildfires and heat waves. Mass shootings, major plane crashes, tornadoes and random chemical explosions. They’ve all been mixed into the bitter cup from which we’ve sipped.
But it’s been generations — decade upon decade — since this state has seen anything like the death toll that February’s winter storm has wrought. Not since nearly 600 people died in the 1947 Texas City explosion have so many Texans been sent so suddenly to their graves — more than in Hurricanes Harvey and Ike combined. More than Tropical Storm Allison, which killed 55 Texans in 2001. More than in the 1953 Waco tornadoes, which exceeded 100 deaths. More than the 137 who died in the 1985 crash of Delta Airlines Flight 135 at the Dallas airport. More than the 15 who died in the chemical plant explosion that devastated the tiny town of West.
Those few days this past February, when the mercury plummeted and our energy sources quickly followed suit, and men, women and children died in their beds, will go down in history not just as one of Texas’ deadliest disasters, taking nearly 200 lives by latest counting, but also as a sort of reckoning for this state of neglect that passes for government.
In the same way that the pandemic’s grim toll on Texas — nearly 50,000 lives lost statewide — exposed holes in our public health system, the storm shined a light on Texas’ broken governance. Our elected leaders, with their shortsighted policies on everything from electric deregulation to air quality to caring for foster children, the mentally ill and the uninsured, leave us in a state perpetually teetering on the brink of crisis. They’re hedging their bets with our lives, in the name of conservative principle.
What is conservative about saving us a few dollars on taxes and electricity bills if some of us end up paying with our lives? What is fiscally responsible about a system of energy generation that allows industry to profit from crisis while millions of Texas households and businesses are stuck with the bills: lost pay, lost revenue, exorbitant electric bills?
We’d like to say that the winter storm that led to February’s historic blackout represented a long-awaited winter for Texas leaders’ recklessness. We’d like to believe that legislative efforts in Austin to respond to the storm represent some kind of awakening, a Texas Spring, if you will, of responsible policymaking.
But a few seeds of goodwill and promises of reform do not a revolution make.
And yes, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, we agree with you that Texas needs to “revolutionize” the system that fuels the power grid and supplies energy to our homes. But we need a broader revolution in the way our elected officials view their jobs. We’re not asking for far-left fantasies of compassion and equity — not today, anyway.
For the purposes of this moment, this editorial, we’ll define our revolutionary demands in the humblest of terms.
Competence. We merely ask for competence. We ask that your policies stop killing people — whether they be mentally ill patients trapped on waiting lists for scarce hospital beds or vulnerable Texans whose medical devices need a reliable power grid to keep them alive.
The number of Texans who died now stands at 194, close to twice the official tally. The larger total was determined by a troop of Houston Chronicle journalists, who dug through news accounts, death records and coroner’s reports.
Of the nearly 200 dead, at least 100 died of hypothermia. Yes, in the year 2021, they died of the cold, and often in their own homes shuddering to death while Texas’ much-hyped independent power grid came within “minutes or seconds” of absolute, weeks-long collapse. Sadly, the number is not complete. The Austin medical examiner’s office is investigating another 80 deaths the week of the storm, and other inquiries continue across the Lone Star State.
But as it stands the count includes 16 who died of carbon monoxide poisoning even as they turned to desperate and dangerous ways of keeping warm. Twenty-two Texans whose lives depended on medical devices lost them during the storm, as their powered-off machines went still.
Texans, if we can’t keep our children alive in their beds, we’re not worthy of the pride we heap on this place we love.
Texas itself — this great, powerful, innovative state we call home — needs a serious physical, and we’re seeing no signs it has even made an appointment with a doctor.
Our diagnosis would begin with the idea among some in Republican leadership that our state government need do little more than put out a shiny welcome mat and hold open the door for employers to relocate here, bringing jobs and money with them.
The simplistic idea, championed by every governor since at least Democrat Ann Richards left office, and reinforced by Republican majorities in the state House and Senate, and by all nine members of the Texas Supreme Court, is that if we can keep the cost of doing business here low, then job-creators will come to Texas and stay.
Have they come? Indeed. And they’ve brought jobs. But what Texas leaders miss amid their boasting is that nobody wants to live in a place where their kids can’t breathe clean air, where they struggle to find an educated workforce, where their aging parents might die in a dayslong power outage.
When nobody’s watching out enough for our water and air, it gets polluted. And energy infrastructure, overseen by agencies whose top priorities seem to be keeping the energy markets happy, gets neglected.
Such neglect, deadly as we have seen, is a crime — or it ought to be.
As much as these numbers are a rude awakening, they are also a welcome antidote to that most natural of inclinations — the desire to move on. The weather in Texas is warming our shoulders and, in that annual miracle of growth, teasing the budding bluebonnets out of the ground.
They come too just as Christians the world over are celebrating Easter Sunday, that time of hope which arrives with flowers and liturgy and Sunday dress, full of ham and family and, perhaps in vaccinated families, hugs.
But the full Easter story is about more than hope. It’s about sacrifice and death, too. Before the surprise at the empty tomb, came Gethsemane and the garden of doubt, the pain of the cross, and loneliness of Calvary.
Houston, we’ve been through a passion of our own this past year. Let us now commit to earn if not salvation, a bit of sanctuary. That starts by recognizing that our pain this past winter was born not of the cruelty of Mother Nature, but of the folly of man.
The good news is that what man has destroyed, he is capable of repairing — if he can only be bothered to see the need.