7/13/2023 0 Comments Texas freeze 2021 dates![]() ![]() Within four days of the lights going out, we could not drink water from the tap because of problems at the treatment plants. These scenes, and worse ones, would repeat themselves for days as the state was buffeted by waves of snow and freezing rain and the power did not return. At a pharmacy on Congress Avenue, a line of people stretched around the block. By the highway, tents belonging to people without housing were surrounded by snow. When we reached downtown, the power was on, but things seemed hardly less desperate. There were more burst pipes on our way, along with abandoned cars and darkened homes. Much of it had frozen on the stairs creating an icy waterfall of human waste blocking that access to the apartments. The next morning, on the drive to the hotel that the station had found for us, the full scope of the crisis started coming into focus.Īt an apartment building up the street from us, a second-floor wastewater line had frozen and burst, sending a stream of sewage down an outside stairway and into the parking lot. We spent that first freezing night bundled together in my kids’ room. Mose Buchele Mose's daughter holds up a lantern during the 2021 blackout. He started to arrange getting us a place to stay. I said I could work if my family and I had those things. But, he said, the station needed me to help report on the blackout. For several months, Mondays had been a day off for me as part of a voluntary COVID-19 furlough policy. When cell phone service returned, I saw missed messages from my editor. She doubted its ability to recover quickly. She knew the state was not prepared for this kind of weather. My wife was the first in our family to suggest that things were not going to be okay. But, of course, that line would come back, repeated by our Governor, to sow confusion about the cause of the disaster that I didn’t yet know was unfolding. I felt no need to correct him right then. They said there were probably no rooms left.Īnother neighbor volunteered that the windmills in West Texas had stopped working, causing the blackout. They had just returned from a four-mile walk downtown to find a hotel room. One couple told us their old pier-and-beam house had leaked out all its heat. I made cheery plans with another local dad to meet for a whiskey later in the day, just to keep the cold off.īut by midmorning, warning signs had started to appear. We did snow angels at the closed-down elementary school by our house and checked in with people dragging sheets of cardboard to our neighborhood’s few sled-able hills. There were virtually no cars, and the roads had become slippery pedestrian boulevards. I remember the muffled silence of that morning. “The fact that we’ve got COVID-19 which temporarily put a brake on emissions last year does not mean that the need for climate action is diminishing.Mose Buchele KUT reporter Mose Buchele sleds with his two children on the first morning of the 2021 snow storm. “The fact that we had a relatively cold month does not negate climate change, it does not reverse the long-term trend in rising temperatures due to global warming, climate change”, she said. Nullis noted that average carbon dioxide concentrations in February were 416.75 parts per million, up from 413.4 parts per million in February 2020. ![]() Emissions keep risingĪccording to the latest data on carbon dioxide concentrations, greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise.Ĭiting the Mauna Loa station in Hawaii - a benchmark reference station – Ms. This value represents the coldest monthly anomaly for almost six years, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Globally, February 2021 was close to the 1991-2020 average, but 0.26 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1981-2010 average. We expect this trend to continue”, WMO said in a statement. ![]() “Cold records are becoming rarer, in contrast to heat temperature records and heatwaves. The UN agency also cautioned that although February was a relatively cold month, this does not negate the long-term warming trend from climate change. Cold records, ‘becoming rarer’įebruary temperatures were also well below the 1991-2020 average over much of the Russian Federation and North America, but they were well above average over parts of the Arctic, and from northwest Africa to southern Europe and China. Nullis added that no less than 62 all-time daily cold minimum temperature records were broken in the United States from February 11-16, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. ![]()
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