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Post by Beth on Feb 17, 2021 21:27:13 GMT
As an immigrant to Texas, those of us from other parts of the country probably outnumber the native born. The major cities including Austin wouldn't be growing at the rate they are based native born.
Ian we have slab basements in a large area of the country because you can't dig basements for foundations. In Florida the water table is to high, in my part of Texas we are sitting on rock that would mean blasting a basement. To build our house they had to bring in dirty and build on top of it.
As for our situation. We got power back yesterday afternoon but we still don't have water. Currently we have freezing rain. Friday we are supposed to get in the 40's. we have no power because our water utility had no power and couldn't pump water. No only the power grid was a problem but our water utility is a small rural one that has not been able to keep up with the fast growth in the area. When we moved to Texas Hutto was a small town (14000 according to the 2010 census and around 5000 household) Just the development I live in that has sprung up in the last 5 years has 1500 houses and we are surrounded by developments of the same size. We are growing faster than the infrastructure.
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Post by quincannon on Feb 17, 2021 21:40:06 GMT
Yes, that's true, but it was not Texas then, it was considered a wasteland frontier of Mexico, and Spanish. Actually under Spanish and later Mexican rule it still was not Texas, but a sub state of a more developed Mexican Province. Texas only became a separate entity following the Declaration of Independence at Washington on the Brazos in March 1836, a few days before the Alamo fell.
You would be a bit peeved too if those immigrant jokers built their hovels on the best Tepee sites too.
To illustrate the point above, there were five mission sites selected along the San Antonio River, the Alamo, and four others. Each of them were selected on traditional Indian camp sites for a purpose. The Franciscan's goal was to civilize the Indians by teaching them how to farm and to some extent ranch, so what better place to set up shop than the areas the learned they Indians frequented on a regular basis. The Franciscans followed the same pattern up the coast of California and throughout the Southwest. It was sort of like Kevin Costner's "Field Of Dreams" - Build it and they will come.
You keep growing those damned blueberries Beth. Better days are coming. Thought you lived in Round Rock?
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Post by yanmacca on Feb 19, 2021 15:43:43 GMT
Hi Beth, it will take more then this cold weather to keep you down, you are our frontier gal!
Going back to our old home, the raft or slab to you, was only laid under the down stairs bathroom, the rest of the house was sprung floored. The bathrooms was a new build and got built 70 years after the main house.
The house we are in now is all sprung floored, which has it'd good points and bad points.
We can't wait to get into our garden, the last few weeks have been really cold with a lot of snow and ice, which is very unusual for us.
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Post by Beth on Feb 19, 2021 19:50:56 GMT
We have heat and had water--which had to turn off because the hot water heater ruptured. We were able to fill both bathtubs with water before we discovered the problem but it's not potable. We'll use it for sanitation and hopefully get bottled water. We had a couple dozen bottles that we had stocked up with on our last trip plus several gallons of distilled that I use for my CPAP which is drinkable. There is no water in the stores and I've heard that FEMA is bringing in blankets and water. We have a hotel room booked for Sunday night so we can get showers and frankly just get away even if it is overnight. We will be taking our empty bottles and filling them up while we are there because it is impossible to find water in the grocery stores right now. Getting food is a bit of a problem because so many things require water to cook and as of yesterday there were few restaurants open and no one doing delivery. Luckily we had enough shelve stable food to survive a pandemic and yesterday had spam and cheese sandwiches so we aren't going so starve. It was also just to dangerous for drivers to be out making delivery. Today is warm and the snow and ice is quickly disappearing so perhaps the grocery stores will soon have supplies. Steve's company has been closed since the storm first for no power (a must for a company that needs computers) and now no water. It also means that since they can't open the office that people can't work from home because even if Steve is in his home office he is working on his company's servers. He works for an excellent company though and they are paying everyone for the down time and not forcing them to use PTO (Personal time off if you aren't familiar with the term) Frankly we are a whole lot better than many of our neighbors who have had water lines break in their ceiling. The damage for the ruptured lines would be covered by insurance but the water heater isn't. However the deductible for covered damage would be $2100 while replacing the heater will be less and fixing the burst lines involves having plumbers, insulation, dry wallers and painters. Now to find a plumber--which I hear one of the talking heads on the news say it's easier to find a Covid shot in Texas than a plumber. It's too early to tell if I lost my garden most of the plants were native since it was a pollinator's garden and they aren't built for this type of cold. We may have lost our Texas laurel which would be a shame because it's beautiful in the spring and smells so good but our live oak was enough of a sapling to bend (it did the low limbo) but it didn't break, the two front trees seem to be fine. We won't know about the shrubs and the crepe myrtles until spring. The laurel is the thing that looks like a juniper bush to the far left in the last picture. It was a six to seven foot tall tree, alas since it is a type of evergreen the weight of the ice on the leaves were probably too much for it. If it's gone we will replace it with the crepe myrtle we had been trying to figure out where to put in.
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Post by yanmacca on Feb 19, 2021 20:06:45 GMT
When it warms up after such heavy snow, you do get the risk of flooding, which is heart breaking. Some parts in Britain, have had more then their fare share of rain lately and now we are in for another long period starting this weekend.
Basically, in Britain, we have two type of wind, the westerly and south westerly which bring all our wind a rain (mainly from the remains of tropical storms from over your way) and north and north easterly which bring all the cold, frosty and snowy weather.
Our combi boiler went west on the 23rd of December, but luckily enough we found a bloke to come out of Christmas eve to install a new one at the cost of £1700.
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Post by deadwoodgultch on Feb 19, 2021 22:22:41 GMT
Texas is getting it in large part because they are on a separate power grid from the rest if the country, and the cold weather, bad as it is, has really crippled that grid. Being on a separate grid means that neither the east or west coast power grids that service the rest of the country can transfer excess power to Texas. Texas made their own bed, now unfortunately their people have to suffer because of the political cabal that runs the state. Watched Judge Lina Hildago of Harris County (Houston and surrounding area) explain what was happening on my news feed last night. Bad shit, real bad. Hildago is a remarkable woman. She did not immigrate to this country until she was fifteen. Since then she has become an American citizen, graduated from one of our best universities (Stanford), and is now the chief executive of the largest county in Texas, and the third largest in the country. She just turned 29 years old. Would not surprise me if she was sitting in Austin some day relatively soon. One thing I really like about Hildago is that she never appears on TV without the Lone Star Flag of Texas being in the background, symbolizing the people of Texas are her first priority. That also serves as a reminder that Texas itself was founded by all immigrants, some from the States, others from south of the Rio Bravo Del Norte, and others, many others, from all parts of Europe. If anything it is the story of the United States in miniature, if anything in Texas could be called miniature. Beth talks about being a blueberry in a bowl of tomato soup. That is true for now, but the blueberries all over Texas , Houston, Austin, San Antonio. Dallas/Fort Worth, and El Paso are all getting exponentially larger, and the bowl of tomato soup has sprung a leak in the bottom. A major problem is that Texas built one of the largest wind farms in the country in West Texas, approved by the Fed and cabal you refer to. It is capable of providing 10-15% of Texas energy needs. However the turbines froze up,and it was too late to switch to the natural gas backup due to gas line freeze. So like California's grid they had to go to rolling blackouts, I guess the Texas cabal learned from another cabal. Regards, Tom
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Post by quincannon on Feb 19, 2021 22:51:09 GMT
That is absolutely false, and it indicates that you have either failed to gather all the data available on the issue, or do not understand the data you have before you.
California does not have its own grid. It is on the western United States grid. Yes. the wind turbines did partially freeze, but they only provide ten percent of the power in Texas. The rest, the other 90 percent is provided by coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy, and all three of those means failed because they were not hardened against cold weather. The fact that these facilities were not hardened is the fault of those that operate the Texas Grid (ERCOT), and the governmental board that supervises all Texas utilities. The reason they stated is that it would cost too much money, and Texas prides itself on providing cheap energy.That governmental supervisory board is appointed by the Governor of Texas.
Now going back in history, this is the third time in the last 30 years this has happened in Texas. The first two times it happened was before there were any wind farms. Each time hardening the system was been brought forward in the Texas legislature as a remedy, and each time so far that proposal has failed.
My state draws a large part of its power from wind farms. If anything it has been colder here over the past 10 days than it has been in Texas. We have had absolutely no problems with power or anything else associated with severe winter weather. Our wind farms are functioning perfectly. Iowa and Oklahoma, who both have invested quite a bit into wind farms as well, are having no problems either. The difference is that we harden our wind and other energy infrastructure, and Texas is too cheap, or too stupid to do so.
Your argument falls apart each time you bring a pen knife's worth of knowledge to an artillery duel.
As a side bar. I can only conclude that your personal attack on me yesterday, is a means of loosening the valve on your anger management problem. Please continue. I am only happy to help in any way I can.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Feb 19, 2021 23:04:18 GMT
My mother and brother seem to be okay in Houston. He says that after tonight it should be getting better. Houston is too close to the Arctic Circle for me sometimes. Man should not have to live North of Interstate 10 nor west of Interstate 95. On the other hand, I have lived south of I-10 and East of I-5 which was tolerable, but I would not want to do it again.
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Post by Beth on Feb 19, 2021 23:15:02 GMT
Tom even going by your numbers wind provide 10% to 15% of the power in Texas and only some of the turbines stopped working. It should not have brought the whole state down. ERCOT is going to have to answer a whole lot of questions in the future about why this happened and how they will fix it because this will happen again and it could have happened in an extreme heat wave as well. BTW get ready for a huge bump in the price of power.
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Post by Beth on Feb 19, 2021 23:16:26 GMT
My mother and brother seem to be okay in Houston. He says that after tonight it should be getting better. Houston is too close to the Arctic Circle for me sometimes. Man should not have to live North of Interstate 10 nor west of Interstate 95. On the other hand, I have lived south of I-10 and East of I-5 which was tolerable, but I would not want to do it again. Yeah I kind of feel that way when I consider moving back to where my family lives.
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Post by quincannon on Feb 19, 2021 23:18:06 GMT
We had ten inches of accumulated snow on the ground this morning and each of the last seven days have seen below zero temperatures at night. Yet our streets are plowed and dry, our utilities are functioning normally throughout the state, and as I sit and type this I am warm, have abundant water, plenty of food, and the state goes on as if it were high summer.
It is the prime function of government to protect its people from emergency situations. When government fails to do that for whatever reason then government has failed in its duty. There is no excuse for what happened in Texas, but there is a reason, that being governments failure to act in the fulfillment of their prime responsibility. That knowledge is little comfort to either Beth, or Colt I imagine, although I do not know his specific situation at the moment, but I do hope he and those dear to him are OK. It will be little comfort to those members of the Texas government that must stand for reelection in the next cycle too.
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colt45
First Lieutenant
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Post by colt45 on Feb 20, 2021 2:35:11 GMT
There are lots of wind farms in my area of Texas, which is north of Abilene and south of Quanah. All of them with only a couple of exceptions have been turning during this cold weather, Not hardening the infrastructure is the problem. ERCOT is mostly to blame, but the politicians should not have just taken ERCOT's word that all would be well. Gas lines should not have been freezing, should have been insulated better.
Water pipes in the ceiling is normally a bad idea, but in Houston, where I have some family, and the Austin area where Beth is, the water table is too close to the surface to reliably run pipes underground, hence the pipes go above ground. It seldom ever hits freezing in Houston, but when it does, it is a certainty pipes will burst and when they thaw, the showers begin all over the house.
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Post by quincannon on Feb 20, 2021 2:55:52 GMT
And you and your family old son, how goes it?
Houston and Austin are a bit different are they not? Houston's water table is too close to the coast, after all it was built on a bayou, and Austin is built on bed rock limestone, like San Antonio. Same problem but different causal factors.
The hardening of infrastructure is a problem throughout the south. After all it NEVER gets cold in the south DOES IT? Well it does get cold, and sometimes damned cold. I do not understand how governments think or fail to think sometimes. We will spend billions of tax payers money in recovery efforts on this one incident, and those same dollars spent before the incident do two things. They prevent or mitigate the suffering of any one event, and two they are still in place and functioning for the next, and the next event, and the one that follows them. An ounce of prevention is worth a hundred pounds of cure.
Governments that do not meet the needs of the people they govern, have only themselves to blame when they are voted out of office, or when a piece of legislation is passed that they themselves don't support. For instance, I would wager that the Green New Deal looks a hell of a lot better today for hundreds of thousands of Texans, and others across the south than it did last week, and governments failure to act in a timely and prudent manner is the cause of all that - hour of their discontent.
You just stay out of trouble Colt and if necessary give your pipes a squirt from your grease gun, that will scare the little buggers enough to keep from freezing.
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Post by yanmacca on Feb 20, 2021 14:56:42 GMT
Here is one for Ted Cruz link
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Post by yanmacca on Feb 20, 2021 14:57:51 GMT
Don't know who ERCOT is, but if they made those mistakes in China, they would be all shot!
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