So much for best-laid plans for posting more regularly. We had another kid and that tends to consume all available free time. There’s a lot of stuff that’s happened in the last year but the thing I want to talk about today is the 2023 Ice Storm. I don’t know if they named it but it has really done a number on the city. More than 30% of the Austin Energy customer base was without power at its peak. The freezing rain started Tuesday night and the power outages not long after that. Our power held until 2:49p on Wednesday, February 1st and then it went down.
Back during “Winter Storm Uri” aka “Snovid” we lost power early in the storm and had to stay in a hotel with our one year old during an OG Covid surge. Our power came back after a while and we were able to come home just before the major outages started happening and the grid almost collapsed. However, we decided at that point we were going to have a standby generator installed. It took almost a full year to get it bought, delivered and installed. That’s covered in a previous post.
Over the summer we had a thunderstorm that knocked out our little corner of the neighborhood for nine hours in the evening and early morning. The generator worked great but I noticed then that it’s a bit on the loud side for my comfort. During the storm I also noticed that the neighbor’s paper mulberry tree that is busy destroying the roof of their shed and sending runners into my backyard was swaying back and forth hard enough to knock into our electrical service drop and cause our power to flicker.
I have an arborist come out every year or two to clean up our trees and I have had Austin Energy come out to clear stuff off the power lines. I called AE about the neighbor tree and they came out, talked to them, and then, instead of just removing it like should be done, they whacked the top off. So now it’s an angry, ugly 20-foot-tall stump wrecking the neighbor’s shed but it’s mostly not threatening my electrical service.
Time marches forward and we arrive in late January, 2023. Another big cold wave is heading down toward our area. The internet is busy making well-earned fun of Texas’s ability to manage its power grid. And people are mostly reacting like it’s not going to be a big deal. It certainly didn’t seem like it was going to be based on the forecast. The NWS forecast didn’t even say it would actually freeze. But the cold and rain came in the evening of January 29th but then it stayed cold and started raining again around 1:30am February 1st. That’s when ice began accumulating on the trees and power lines.
The city has had issues with keeping the power lines clear for a while. It was already a problem in the 2021 storm but this year the ice just overwhelmed an already ragged arbor. Trees all over the city started shedding huge limbs or just completely falling over or breaking off. There was a 15″+ diameter live oak in a yard up the street that just snapped off two feet from the ground and a big tree on the state property nearby that was completely uprooted just by the ice accumulation. There wasn’t even much wind.
By mid-day on the 1st fully 30% of the city was without electrical service and there it stayed until temperatures climbed above freezing on the 3rd. Crews were restoring power but they couldn’t keep up with the amount of new outages. The ice had to melt before they could start catching up.
We lost power at 2:49pm on February 1st and the generator started up and took over about 20 seconds later. Since then, it has run for more than three days and I’m guessing we have another day or two to go at this point. The number of “customers”, which I take to mean meters, without power is currently around 54,000 (9:30pm 2/4/23) down from the highest number I saw which was over 165,000. Austin Energy claims that they have restored power to over 265,000 customers but some of them they must have had to do more than once. We’re still offline, making our own electricity and there’s big chunks of the neighborhood still dark.
I feel bad about how loud the generator is. It’s really unpleasant to be outside near it and the constant drone inside wears on you. It’s not too bad in the kids rooms. The nursery is actually pretty insulated from it so I think we did good there. I’m thinking about building a little sound proofing hut over it to be neighborly but that’s a big time commitment and I’m hoping not to have to run this thing like this very much. I guess we’ll see if that bubbles up the project list at all.
That said, it was totally worth the cost. Three days without power or off in a hotel or whatever with two small kids in freezing weather would have been awful. They’re just getting over the latest round of thankfully not-Covid daycare crud and the dog has actually been sick as well with a UTI. Plus all the refrigerator food and the last year’s worth of milk for the baby would have all been a loss as well. I don’t like that it has basically come to us playing prepper but I’ll be damned if it didn’t pay off in spades not even two years later.