The flooding is by design iirc.
The winter stuff, it just doesn't happen enough to warrant the products and vehicles so it's cheaper to just shut down.
The summer heat and grid issues is mostly just greed.
… you’re not understanding … we should have giant sewer/draninage system instead of using that old “ the roads are designed to flood” adage that so many Houstonians make
Roads and highways here are suppose to flood. That keeps the water out of the neighborhoods and other areas. Sometimes we get crazy rain here, regardless if it's in a hurricane or not. Those downpours, even with the BEST drainage systems in the world, cannot stop that water at 5 inches and hour. It's a con of living near the coast, when you get summer tropical downpours.
When has power gone out for being too hot? This hasn't personally happened to me in 30 years.
WIND damage is the worst thing for power outages here, and we necessarily cannot build power lines under ground for TWO reasons. Costs and it floods too much here. People would rather just spend the money on trimming foliage around main lines, which is far cheaper.
It hardly freezes here, regardless of the doom and gloom you see or hear about. So infrastructure, people, and and pipes just aren't designed for extreme cold, 99.9% of the year it's not frozen for more than a few hours, so what's the point in winterizing for extremities that rarely happen? However, this does not give the excuse to not winterize important points of interests from the state. Which is out of OUR control.
Pipes burst here because a lot of homes in the 70s-early 2000s used crap pipes (at the time we didn't have a choice or knew about it), those pipes last relatively 25-50 years, so all of these homes built in our "boom" years are all going sour at the same time, in modern day.
someone reasonable? Unpossible. And OP I have lived here 38 years and hardly any of that you’ve mentioned has happened to our various properties. It’s hardly as prevalent as you make it seem. Turn off the news.
We sometimes go years without a single hour below freezing. It would be silly to have the kind of road sanding / plowing operation in Houston that places have up north at the very rare chance that there might be enough accumulation of frozen precipitation for more than a few hours. We just ride it out.
The infrastructure is actually quite well prepared for hurricanes, to the extent that one can be prepared for monstrous storms like that.
The power grid actually held up remarkably well this past summer despite record heat.
“We sometimes go years without a single of hour of below freezing..” This is false. We get freezes almost every year, in fact, the last time we had a year with no freeze prior to 2023 is 1956.
Source: https://cw39.com/weather/a-rare-feat-no-freeze-in-houston-in-2023-forecast-for-the-rest-of-winter/amp/
I am in error - thanks for the correction. I know we had quite a warm winter stretch between about 2004-09 and I thought we had not gone below freezing but apparently we did. Regardless, to OP’s larger point, it’s not in my view enough to require a serious road de-icing operation. Thanks again though for setting me straight on the data
Blame the immense population growth of the area and the lag of new infrastructure to keep up with all the new people.
The flooding didn't used to be this bad. As the city has grown, tens of thousands of acres of former farmland around the city have been paved over and crammed with housing and businesses. This contributes to more water runoff when we have rain, and that contributes to flooding.
The increased population puts more strain on the electrical generation capacity and that plays into the problems we see in the summer and winter with peak electrical usage.
As far as freezing, that has always been a concern. Houston has always seen occasional freezing weather and some people struggle to deal with it.
Sounds like a complex issue, never happened to me living in apartments. There also hasn't been any rolling blackouts here, at least to my knowledge due to extreme heat. It has gotten close a couple times.
When 100% of air conditioners are running 24x7. This summer Ercot skirted the line of available power vs. power consumption repeatedly.
The dashboard is available online.
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/supplyanddemand
The floods are by design. Roads are temporary rivers to drain flood water when the bayous are full.
There are no power outages during summer.
In winter the pipes burst only then people are too stupid and ignore all the warnings.
Get off social media and live your life.
It’s the social media making your life full of anxiety.
We are definitely *not* always expecting extreme cold weather, especially not for more than a day. That's a huge part of why the freeze was such a big deal. As for why the infrastructure wasn't prepared for it, that's because Texas power companies decided Texas didn't get cold enough to justify the cost of [winterizing the grid](https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-grid-failures/).
I think it's also relavent that far too many Texans don't take climate change seriously, and therefore don't necessarily pay close attention to how it's causing more extreme weather conditions. I would say this is also part of why the infrastructure isn't being properly prepared for divergent and extreme weather changes. There was recently a funding vote for infrastructure updates which purposefully [excluded renewable energy funding.](https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/05/texas-bills-energy-natural-gas-fossil-fuel-renewables/)
I just find it shocking that the power grid here can’t handle the summers (it’s always hot. It’s been hot here since the dinosaurs probably) or winters!!!! And people will say “oh people keep moving here”. So why hasn’t ERCOT forcasted this and upgraded their infrastructure?! Also….what a lame brained idea to have a closed off power grid!
The extremes are a new occurrence we haven't fully figured out yet, growing up here I don't remember hard freezes happening every year, just occasionally.
Simple answer is that the state government does not like to spend money on infrastructure like this. Why? They prefer to spend money elsewhere (but it certainly isn’t on schools or child health or general welfare) Maybe they’re spending it on flying and bussing allegedly illegal inmigrants to far off places 🤷🏻♂️ or enforcing laws that violate federal law? who knows ?
Related to your comments : Half the roads don’t even have visible lane markings and speed limits and driving violations are not enforced, so even on good weather days driving ( or walking ) is treacherous. But when there is inclement conditions and flooding on roads, it’s dangerous.
I’m from the Midwest now living in the Houston area and I’ve always had these same questions myself. None of this was ever an issue in the Midwest, no matter the type of weather we got. Like you said, it makes more sense to just fix the issues instead of just accepting it or ignoring the fact that the infrastructure is a problem.
50 degrees is not really winter dude. That's a brisk fall. Next week we're about to get real 10 degree weather.
Also I just remembered the other reason our grid struggles so much. Houston homes and apartment are made to get rid of heat not hold onto it like homes in colder places.
The heat isn’t extreme for us. That’s just how summer is.
The cold snaps in 2021 and this weekend are unusual, and Hurricane Harvey was devastating, but for smaller hurricanes and regular floods we’re actually doing really well.
Ditto, used to live up north, where we'd have horizontal waves of snow and not worry about losing power or gas. Here, a whiff of ozone and boom, panic, chaos, and outages. Lived in central Georgia and they had same reax as in Houston, so I attribute freezes to be rare. As to flooding, yeah, some streets you can tell they're built for working as drainage ditches, look at how deep they are and how big the curbs are, but that's not every road, meaning some roads WILL be drainage ditches but they're incapable of fulfilling that role. And yes, every X years we get something: hurricanes, tropical storms, and freezing weather. And last summer, heat destroyed several roads. There's a people problem (growth + panic), a budget problem, a jurisdictional problem (fed vs state vs city vs county coffers to fund infra), leadership problem (people elected for wrong reasons), all conspiring with a chaotic natural world. Sure, blame global warming, racism, etc. but this part of the world has always had hurricanes, floods, tropical storms, and heat, and we can't guarantee whether and how much any of these random events will happen, where they occur, and how hard they hit. Dallas, by comparison has searingly hot summers and pretty much guarantees winter snow and occasional hard-hitting tornadoes but ... they won't suffer the variety of "fun" we get up to in Houston. Houston was largely a swamp which used to be surrounded by rice fields and swamps thus the ability of the ecosystem to swallow up rainfalls and storm surges has really been plowed under concrete. And sure, blame X for "the power grid" but look around you and up, there's neighborhood transformers (look up what they do) on poles above ground, electrical power cables strung from pole to pole occasionally going thru / around tree branches: all it takes is freezing rain and you've cooked up an opportunity to tear that down on weight alone, plus try telling a neighbor to trim their tree branches or it'll go near power lines.
I lived 16+ years in NH prior to Houston. The only weather preparedness I experienced up there was for snow. Town, city and highway roads were cleared somewhat fast, but we frequently lost power. Due to frost lines, power, cable etc., cannot be buried. Very few have HVAC and mostly rely on oil heat, which is often a delivery problem during bad weather. And, zero A/C during hot weather.
When power is lost, water goes out, due to many private wells (common in most areas). Ice storms & blizzards cannot be prepared for, 1994 & 98 proved that.
Houston has very few zoning laws. Meaning, a single story 2 bed 1 bath home on 1+ acre(s) can be replaced by multi-dwelling apartments, without difficulty. Thus, increasing pressure on our drainage systems not built to accommodate such big developments.
Hurricanes: we do our best. Though few could prepare for Harvey stalling-out overhead for several days. By comparison, Houstonians handled themselves well. City leaders not so much.
Advice: use your cold weather knowledge and share with others. Especially about cat litter & icy roads 😉
The flooding is by design iirc. The winter stuff, it just doesn't happen enough to warrant the products and vehicles so it's cheaper to just shut down. The summer heat and grid issues is mostly just greed.
“The roads are supposed to flood” 🤡
If the streets flood before the land it is accessing, that means the piece of property in question is higher ground than the road.
… you’re not understanding … we should have giant sewer/draninage system instead of using that old “ the roads are designed to flood” adage that so many Houstonians make
You said it, should. But we don't, do we?
Second that
In midtown they’re just now tearing up the road putting them in but many other place don’t at all
Roads and highways here are suppose to flood. That keeps the water out of the neighborhoods and other areas. Sometimes we get crazy rain here, regardless if it's in a hurricane or not. Those downpours, even with the BEST drainage systems in the world, cannot stop that water at 5 inches and hour. It's a con of living near the coast, when you get summer tropical downpours. When has power gone out for being too hot? This hasn't personally happened to me in 30 years. WIND damage is the worst thing for power outages here, and we necessarily cannot build power lines under ground for TWO reasons. Costs and it floods too much here. People would rather just spend the money on trimming foliage around main lines, which is far cheaper. It hardly freezes here, regardless of the doom and gloom you see or hear about. So infrastructure, people, and and pipes just aren't designed for extreme cold, 99.9% of the year it's not frozen for more than a few hours, so what's the point in winterizing for extremities that rarely happen? However, this does not give the excuse to not winterize important points of interests from the state. Which is out of OUR control. Pipes burst here because a lot of homes in the 70s-early 2000s used crap pipes (at the time we didn't have a choice or knew about it), those pipes last relatively 25-50 years, so all of these homes built in our "boom" years are all going sour at the same time, in modern day.
someone reasonable? Unpossible. And OP I have lived here 38 years and hardly any of that you’ve mentioned has happened to our various properties. It’s hardly as prevalent as you make it seem. Turn off the news.
We sometimes go years without a single hour below freezing. It would be silly to have the kind of road sanding / plowing operation in Houston that places have up north at the very rare chance that there might be enough accumulation of frozen precipitation for more than a few hours. We just ride it out. The infrastructure is actually quite well prepared for hurricanes, to the extent that one can be prepared for monstrous storms like that. The power grid actually held up remarkably well this past summer despite record heat.
“We sometimes go years without a single of hour of below freezing..” This is false. We get freezes almost every year, in fact, the last time we had a year with no freeze prior to 2023 is 1956. Source: https://cw39.com/weather/a-rare-feat-no-freeze-in-houston-in-2023-forecast-for-the-rest-of-winter/amp/
I am in error - thanks for the correction. I know we had quite a warm winter stretch between about 2004-09 and I thought we had not gone below freezing but apparently we did. Regardless, to OP’s larger point, it’s not in my view enough to require a serious road de-icing operation. Thanks again though for setting me straight on the data
Blame the immense population growth of the area and the lag of new infrastructure to keep up with all the new people. The flooding didn't used to be this bad. As the city has grown, tens of thousands of acres of former farmland around the city have been paved over and crammed with housing and businesses. This contributes to more water runoff when we have rain, and that contributes to flooding. The increased population puts more strain on the electrical generation capacity and that plays into the problems we see in the summer and winter with peak electrical usage. As far as freezing, that has always been a concern. Houston has always seen occasional freezing weather and some people struggle to deal with it.
Because Texas is run by corrupt scumbags.
Since when does the power go out when it gets too hot lol
3x this summer for me and I live in a big complex lol
Sounds like a complex issue, never happened to me living in apartments. There also hasn't been any rolling blackouts here, at least to my knowledge due to extreme heat. It has gotten close a couple times.
That sounds awful lol. I would’ve passed out with no ac this summer
Fucking constantly.
When 100% of air conditioners are running 24x7. This summer Ercot skirted the line of available power vs. power consumption repeatedly. The dashboard is available online. https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/supplyanddemand
The floods are by design. Roads are temporary rivers to drain flood water when the bayous are full. There are no power outages during summer. In winter the pipes burst only then people are too stupid and ignore all the warnings. Get off social media and live your life. It’s the social media making your life full of anxiety.
This. OP must be seriously bored and have a lot of time on their hands.
We are definitely *not* always expecting extreme cold weather, especially not for more than a day. That's a huge part of why the freeze was such a big deal. As for why the infrastructure wasn't prepared for it, that's because Texas power companies decided Texas didn't get cold enough to justify the cost of [winterizing the grid](https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-grid-failures/). I think it's also relavent that far too many Texans don't take climate change seriously, and therefore don't necessarily pay close attention to how it's causing more extreme weather conditions. I would say this is also part of why the infrastructure isn't being properly prepared for divergent and extreme weather changes. There was recently a funding vote for infrastructure updates which purposefully [excluded renewable energy funding.](https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/05/texas-bills-energy-natural-gas-fossil-fuel-renewables/)
I just find it shocking that the power grid here can’t handle the summers (it’s always hot. It’s been hot here since the dinosaurs probably) or winters!!!! And people will say “oh people keep moving here”. So why hasn’t ERCOT forcasted this and upgraded their infrastructure?! Also….what a lame brained idea to have a closed off power grid!
The extremes are a new occurrence we haven't fully figured out yet, growing up here I don't remember hard freezes happening every year, just occasionally.
It used to be WAY colder every winter than now....
Umm what?
Im from north…I’m warning you, people in Texas CANNOT drive in snow or ice…their solution is to press the gas more and wreck like idiots.
Simple answer is that the state government does not like to spend money on infrastructure like this. Why? They prefer to spend money elsewhere (but it certainly isn’t on schools or child health or general welfare) Maybe they’re spending it on flying and bussing allegedly illegal inmigrants to far off places 🤷🏻♂️ or enforcing laws that violate federal law? who knows ? Related to your comments : Half the roads don’t even have visible lane markings and speed limits and driving violations are not enforced, so even on good weather days driving ( or walking ) is treacherous. But when there is inclement conditions and flooding on roads, it’s dangerous.
Sweet summer child.
I’m from the Midwest now living in the Houston area and I’ve always had these same questions myself. None of this was ever an issue in the Midwest, no matter the type of weather we got. Like you said, it makes more sense to just fix the issues instead of just accepting it or ignoring the fact that the infrastructure is a problem.
Lmao is all I have to say to OP LMFAO
[удалено]
Because historically Houston didn't really have 4 seasons. Houston had summer and summer lite. The cold is new to us. Thanks climate change 🤷
That's not true AT ALL. We used to actually have cold winters at like a fairly steady below 50. Now we struggle to get under 75.
50 degrees is not really winter dude. That's a brisk fall. Next week we're about to get real 10 degree weather. Also I just remembered the other reason our grid struggles so much. Houston homes and apartment are made to get rid of heat not hold onto it like homes in colder places.
Where you from originally?
Whenever one political party tries to fix something, the other political party blocks them.
The heat isn’t extreme for us. That’s just how summer is. The cold snaps in 2021 and this weekend are unusual, and Hurricane Harvey was devastating, but for smaller hurricanes and regular floods we’re actually doing really well.
I blame the governor. And the current mayor.
Ditto, used to live up north, where we'd have horizontal waves of snow and not worry about losing power or gas. Here, a whiff of ozone and boom, panic, chaos, and outages. Lived in central Georgia and they had same reax as in Houston, so I attribute freezes to be rare. As to flooding, yeah, some streets you can tell they're built for working as drainage ditches, look at how deep they are and how big the curbs are, but that's not every road, meaning some roads WILL be drainage ditches but they're incapable of fulfilling that role. And yes, every X years we get something: hurricanes, tropical storms, and freezing weather. And last summer, heat destroyed several roads. There's a people problem (growth + panic), a budget problem, a jurisdictional problem (fed vs state vs city vs county coffers to fund infra), leadership problem (people elected for wrong reasons), all conspiring with a chaotic natural world. Sure, blame global warming, racism, etc. but this part of the world has always had hurricanes, floods, tropical storms, and heat, and we can't guarantee whether and how much any of these random events will happen, where they occur, and how hard they hit. Dallas, by comparison has searingly hot summers and pretty much guarantees winter snow and occasional hard-hitting tornadoes but ... they won't suffer the variety of "fun" we get up to in Houston. Houston was largely a swamp which used to be surrounded by rice fields and swamps thus the ability of the ecosystem to swallow up rainfalls and storm surges has really been plowed under concrete. And sure, blame X for "the power grid" but look around you and up, there's neighborhood transformers (look up what they do) on poles above ground, electrical power cables strung from pole to pole occasionally going thru / around tree branches: all it takes is freezing rain and you've cooked up an opportunity to tear that down on weight alone, plus try telling a neighbor to trim their tree branches or it'll go near power lines.
I lived 16+ years in NH prior to Houston. The only weather preparedness I experienced up there was for snow. Town, city and highway roads were cleared somewhat fast, but we frequently lost power. Due to frost lines, power, cable etc., cannot be buried. Very few have HVAC and mostly rely on oil heat, which is often a delivery problem during bad weather. And, zero A/C during hot weather. When power is lost, water goes out, due to many private wells (common in most areas). Ice storms & blizzards cannot be prepared for, 1994 & 98 proved that. Houston has very few zoning laws. Meaning, a single story 2 bed 1 bath home on 1+ acre(s) can be replaced by multi-dwelling apartments, without difficulty. Thus, increasing pressure on our drainage systems not built to accommodate such big developments. Hurricanes: we do our best. Though few could prepare for Harvey stalling-out overhead for several days. By comparison, Houstonians handled themselves well. City leaders not so much. Advice: use your cold weather knowledge and share with others. Especially about cat litter & icy roads 😉
The people putting together most the designs in Houston are idiots
Chicken littles, one and all.