The Valentine’s Day Freeze
- Michael Jay Tucker's explosive-cargo
- Feb 26
- 5 min read
Okay, last time, I was writing about us getting a Casita, and why it took so dang loooong to get it done. I had just finished off with Covid and the Pandemic, which you gotta admit, is a pretty good reason for delaying anything. Something about not *dying* springs to mind. Perhaps a minor consideration, but one worth keeping in one’s thoughts…
And I had just gotten us to February of 2021. I said we were ready to think about the Casita again. Yay team! Sis boom bah. Or is it Cis boom bah? Or just bah? Whatever.
Then, one morning, I noticed on my phone…while I was cruising…that, by gum, by golly, there was a storm coming. I didn’t think much about it. After all, this part of Texas is pretty temperate. We don’t get a lot of snowy weather down here. Oh, we’ll have storms, and sometimes those will get kinda wild, but that’s wind, not snow.
So I basically ignored the whole thing.
This is known as BDAAB, a.k.a. Being Dumb As A Brick. I know BDAAB well. I spend a lot of time with it. Some would say we’re inseparable.
About the photos: Just some pictures from the storm. As I said in another post, this looks like snow. It isn’t. It’s ice. I got out for a walk a couple of times and it was like stepping on concrete. No happy crunch of snow under your boot. Just a sort of clicking sound.
After that, I’ve got rather a poor photo of Martha on a night of the storm as she cooks on the stove. Thank heaven for gas burners. The light is provided by a battery powered lamp we had.
The final shot is of a local paper’s headline shortly after the storm. ERCOT is our power grid system. Not much has changed with it in the last five years. People In High Places should be concerned about that. For some reason, they’re not.
Anyway, on 10 Feb, the storm entered the state. By 11 Feb, it had reached Georgetown…and everything…EVERYTHING…shut down. It was an ice storm. A major ice storm. Roads were impassable. Partly because of the ice itself…and partly because, well, this is the South. It doesn’t snow here, right? So there’s no reason for towns to buy snow plows? Right? And invest in road salt. Right? And prepare for stuff like that. Right? Of course Right. Uh-huh. Fiscal responsibility at its best.
And…and…by that evening…when it was at its coldest…when everyone really, Really, REALLY needed their furnaces to work (and remember, even many gas furnaces, like ours, need electricity to ignite their flame)...
The power went off.
And stayed off.
Oh, and here’s an interesting thing. We learned later that the power was off not because lines were down or anything like that. No. Not at all. It went off because the power grid ran out of electricity. There wasn’t enough power. You see, the state’s generation capacity wasn’t up to the job. Not when there was so much demand.
And…oh…by the way…in another state, the authorities could have simply purchased more power from other parts of the country that were unaffected by the storm. But not Texas. In a burst of rugged individualism…a.k.a. BDAABness (see above)…the state had opted to decouple from the national grid. Ergo, no buying electricity from all those less rugged and less individualistic states who aren’t nearly as tall in the saddle as John Wayne but who actually had power to sell.
There were a lot of people who were really grumpy when they learned about all that.(1)
Because it roughly coincided with 14 Feb, they ended up calling it the “Valentine’s Day Ice Storm.”(2) Basically, we had cold, darkness, no heat, and fluctuating power for a week. You’d wait for the electricity to come back on (they were rationing it. You got roughly 15 to 30 minutes twice a day) and then you would rush to charge your phone as quickly as possible.
Martha and I made it through it all fairly well. We had blankets and stayed warm, and we had a gas stove that we could light with a match and get hot food, tea, and coffee. So, we did okay. Certainly we did a lot better than many other people in the state. And, yes, there were fatalities.
When things finally got warm again, Martha and I looked around, thought about it all, and then said…You Know What? That Was Not Fun.
And so, we set out to prepare for another storm, should one ever come our way again. We took the money we’d saved for the Casita and bought an auxiliary generator instead. Specifically, we got a Generac natural-gas powered generator. It’s now installed next to the house.
Honestly, in retrospect, I’m not sure it was a wise choice. It’s been no end of trouble (I’m always fighting to get it serviced), it was expensive (very), and we’ve only used it a few times since the Valentine’s Day Storm. But…but…on those occasions when power has gone down here, and the rest of the street is plunged into darkness…it’s been comforting. So, maybe, it was worth it after all.
But it also meant the Casita project went on the back burner. And that’s where it stayed for three years.
Then…
Then, everything changed.
More to come.
Footnotes:
1. Since then, the state said it would begun the process of relinking with the national power grid. Still hasn’t happened yet.
2. For more on the storm, see here: https://www.weather.gov/hgx/2021ValentineStorm
Copyright©2026 Michael Jay Tucker
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