‘Look What You Did to Us’: The Big Chill of Texas Politics

SAN ANTONIO — By the time the second snowfall struck, on Thursday, Feb. 18, Guadalupe Garza, had grown increasingly despondent.

Her electric power had remained on as the deepest freeze in recorded history struck the nation’s seventh largest city, plunging millions into below-freezing conditions, darkness and disillusion. But the water had been out for three days. She drank what bottled water she had and worried that food would run out in her neighborhood on the largely poor and Latino west side before the city’s basic services came back.

“I really didn’t know if it was going to stop,” she said through her tears. “I was depressed.” She had lost her 56-year-old son, Robert, an Army veteran, to Covid-19 in December and now this. She desperately wanted to go to church, but at 72, with inches of freak snow and sheer black ice coating the streets, venturing out was too dangerous. A full week would pass before she left her home and only then it wasn’t for the store; it was for Guadalupe Church on El Paso Street to light a votive candle.

As President Joe Biden landed in Houston Friday, temperatures had returned to a balmier 76 degrees or so, but the merciless arctic freeze that crippled the state, knocking out power to as many as 4 million people for several days, has left a trail of damage that will take weeks, if not months, to repair. Economists estimate the total damage of winter storm Uri will exceed $100 billion, placing it on the scale of Hurricanes Harvey and Ike, the second and third most costly in recent U.S. history. The death toll, now hovering around 30 in Texas (80 across all the states hit), seems likely to more than triple to Harvey and Ike levels, too. About 1 million people in South Texas are hungry.

The hardest breach to repair, however, might be between Texans and their elected officials. Over the course of the cascading humanitarian crisis high-ranking Texas politicians didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory.

First, Austin falsely blamed renewable energy, even assailing a policy proposal that hadn’t even become law yet. One GOP member of Congress sent a letter to constituents with a link to warming centers before closing with a warning that “radical ideologies have politicized energy policy at the state and federal level in recent years.” Then they went after the utility industry that was once the state’s pride.

“The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has been anything but reliable over the past 48 hours,” said Gov. Greg Abbott, rebuking the independent entity that controls power generation across almost the entire state. Officials managed to skip past their pledge from a decade ago, after the last catastrophic freeze, to winterize their power plants. Then, instead of chipping in, as former Rep. Beto O’Rourke did, several of the state’s most prominent Republican elected officials headed out for warmer locales, or at least ones where the power was still on.

And the public, trapped in their flooded, frozen, barren-fridge misery, noticed.

“I think that the mayor was trying to do his best,” San Antonio resident Guadalupe P. Garza, 79, (and no relation to the other Mrs. Garza) told me. “But I blame the governor. When it came to Covid he wouldn’t shut down the state. We [are] in this predicament now in San Antonio because of him. I would just like to shake him and say: ‘Look at what you did to us and to San Antonio, our city.’”

Assessing the effectiveness of disaster response is a famously fraught political game. What looks like a master class in bureaucratic crisis management from inside an emergency operations center can seem laughably insufficient to the people bundled in blankets outside an overwhelmed food bank. But all sorts of Texans, from shivering private citizens to frustrated public officials, say that Texas’ state leaders failed them.

In the face of a monstrous storm Abbott’s response was tepid, at best. He didn’t deploy the National Guard in any sizable numbers before, during or after the storm. There are no state aid facilities handing out water or food. In his Feb. 13 letter to Biden, Abbott asked for direct financial assistance and help with emergency services. Normally, governors, including Abbott, request military help, money for local governments and hazard mitigation to make sure properties are habitable, and even social services. But not not this time. His request was comparatively minuscule. His office in Austin did not respond to a request for comment.

The storm revealed an uncomfortable power-play between GOP leaders in Austin and their mostly Democratic counterparts in the state’s big cities. In Texas, examples of local autonomy routinely run afoul of a governor who jealously guards his prerogatives to override everything from plastic bag bans to mandatory mask orders. But when the cities are in crisis, the sense is that it’s their problem to sort out, not his. Millions of Texans have nearly frozen in the dark and have been on a boil-water notice, without running water in days.

“The state government must provide emergency assistance to repair water infrastructure, or we risk millions being without water for a week,” Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and housing secretary, pleaded on Twitter. Abbott “failed to prepare for this storm, was too slow to respond, and now blames everyone but himself for this mess.”

On the day before Valentine’s Day, winter storm Uri roared out of Siberia, over the North Pole onto the Great Plains. The town of Bottineau, N.D., plummeted to minus 51 degrees celsius, according to the National Weather Service, the coldest in 128 years. From there, Uri rushed south, reaching Tyler, a sleepy city in the East Texas pine country, where the thermometer dropped to six below zero. Texas hadn’t seen cold like this since 1899, when rivers dumped ice into the Gulf of Mexico.

All the way into South Texas, Uri laid waste to the state’s agriculture, killing cows caught out on the plains and those in feedlots. The storm froze the ears right off of newborn calves, according to the Dallas Morning News. Sorghum and watermelon crops were ravaged. Citrus groves were hit so hard the effect will still be felt in 2022. People weren’t spared, either.

Just after midnight on Monday, Feb. 15, Ron Marks, an IT consultant in Austin, lost power at his house in the Bouldin Creek neighborhood, a once eclectic collection of musicians, rednecks and Hispanics that has gentrified of late. Rolling blackouts across the state left 2 million Texans without power, which became 4 million by Monday afternoon. In total darkness, the temperature plunged to 10 degrees. Inside Marks’ home, the internal temperature dropped into the 40s.

By Tuesday morning, food in the fridge began to rot. His wife, Leslie Bonnell, could see her breath. An Austinite for 30 years, Marks found himself confused: How long would this go on? They loaded up luggage, an elderly dog and drove through deep snow to a friend’s house where there was still power and heat.

By Feb. 16, Abbott had turned his ire on the wind and solar industry, which was not responsible, on the friendly airwaves of Fox News. Then he spun around in a news conference to point his finger at the industry’s self-regulating body, left largely untouched by the state, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. (ERCOT is a private body that tells member utilities how much power to produce, depending upon factors like weather and fuel supplies and is supposed to be regulated by the state.) Famously independent, Texas’ energy grid stands apart from the rest of the country. When natural gas wellheads iced up, pipelines froze and coal piles were encased in ice, the state couldn’t draw electricity from other sources and the grid largely shut down. ERCOT responded with rolling blackouts for 26 million people, out of 30 million Texans, on its grid.

“The lack of information was just terrible. There was way more opinion than information,” Marks, 57, said. “I kept thinking, ‘Where is the Emergency Broadcast System?’”

Across Austin, people fled to friends and neighbors, choosing the risk of Covid-19 infection over freezing to death. Others stayed put. Taya Williams, who runs a hair-styling business, and her partner dug in. They cooked frozen meat and rice on a gas range. Eighty hours would elapse with no power, no heat and no water.

“We didn’t realize it was going to be so terrible. But we went into survival mode and we both did pretty great until about three days in,” Williams said. “I started losing hope that anything was going to change.”

By the end of the week, power had been largely restored, but millions were under boil-water notices because the blackouts had zapped water treatment facilities and officials were worried about contamination.

In the midst of the still-unspooling crisis, it turned out that Attorney General Ken Paxton, under felony indictment, had jetted off to Utah. A state senator had taken a private jet to Florida. And, of course, Sen. Ted Cruz had been caught red-handed slinking off to Cancun with his family.

The wags at El Arroyo, a legendary Tex-Mex dive in downtown Austin, updated their daily street sign commentary: “If you’re cold, just Cruz to Mexico.” Yet rage was building. People had begun to die: in their homes, in their stranded vehicles, inside idling cars in their garages. Galveston ordered a meat refrigeration truck for the dead.

Abbott didn’t even bother to call his big-city mayors.

“I have not talked to the governor at any time during this crisis, but we’re pushing forward.” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told MSNBC on Friday, Feb. 19. “The White House has reached out to me several times, and we’ve had those communications.”

This might not surprise students of Texas politics. After all, years ago, Abbott had declared a kind of war on his cities. He didn’t like them regulating business where the state hadn’t.

At first, he battled them over environmental laws like banning plastic grocery bags, which blew everywhere in the Texas wind. He fought with them over natural-gas fracking inside city limits, which tended to set off earthquakes. Then came the pandemic. He refused to let them impose mask-wearing mandates, shut down local economies or even limit restaurant services, whether capacity or hours. He excluded mayors from briefings on the pandemic. A self-described small government constitutionalist, he was really a new breed: a big government Republican, claiming to defend limited government while expanding state power if it meant protecting business interests.

So, this time, the cities’ own response was erratic. Dallas told downtown buildings to cut back on power use. Yet in Houston and Austin soaring downtown skyscrapers were lit up even as people shivered in the dark elsewhere. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, whose jurisdiction includes Houston, called the light show “maddening.”

Catching wind that utilities were sending people $16,000 bills, an angry Ron Nirenberg, the mayor of San Antonio vowed in his daily briefing: “There will be hell to pay.”

In his Feb. 13 letter to Biden, it was what the governor didn’t ask for that stuck out. He asked for no military help with logistics or aid distribution. He didn’t ask for disaster unemployment insurance, money for local governments, not even hazard mitigation for damaged homes, not even food or water. He asked for no military assistance. Abbott asked only for direct financial assistance for individuals and help keeping emergency services going until the storm passed.

In sharp contrast, Abbott asked for and got massive federal help before Hurricane Harvey even came ashore in August 2017. At his request, FEMA pre-positioned people and supplies, linking up with the Texas Emergency Management Agency, bringing in over 1 million meals, 3 million bottles of water, blankets and cots, and providing medical services to more than 5,000 Texans. The federal government even brought in 210,000 pounds of hay for livestock, according to FEMA’s 2017 after-action report. The Air Force flew 30 missions, mostly ferrying supplies. Abbott activated all 30,000 members of the Texas National Guard. But none of that happened this time.

Abbott was in a different political situation. On the one hand there was a Democratic president in office, not his old ally Donald Trump. On the other hand, Abbott’s biggest threat, as he prepares to run for reelection in 2022 and possibly the presidency in 2024, isn’t to his left but to his right. Florida transplant Allen West chairs the Texas GOP and is even calling for secession.

“My sense is that Abbott is calibrating his relationship with a Democratic president,” said James Henson, a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Despite the human toll, Abbott, say, doesn’t want ads in 2022 portraying him as hat-in-hand to Biden. “The Republicans just want to do the bare essential here, and they don’t want to do too much. Plus, Abbott doesn’t want this storm to be the focus of another news cycle.”

“Federal assistance is needed to lessen the threat of disaster, save lives, and protect property, public health and safety,” he wrote to Biden without mentioning the long tail of the storm, prolonged lack of water, and the likelihood of continuing financial turmoil about how to pay bills as simple as essential as next month’s rent. And potentially worse: the rising specter of hunger in the poor parts of San Antonio and all of South Texas.

With little help from the state, the aid task has fallen on the local government, private citizens and local charities. Bexar County here was one of dozens forced to issue boil-water notices. Now, the city is still distributing water bottles for 14 days straight. Firefighters and fire department cadets loaded 31 pallets in cars at the parking lot of Our Lady of the Lake University on Sunday, Feb. 21.

“We still have lots of people without water,” said the firefighter in charge, who would only identify herself as Bertha. “As long as I’ve been alive, I’ve seen nothing like this.”

The storm and its after-effects touched everyone, up and down and the socioeconomic scale.

In the palm-shaded, historic King William neighborhood, lawyer Jennifer Espronceda, saw burst pipes spraying water under her building and alongside a wall. Having lost her house in the 2011 freeze, when it burned during a power surge, she felt a familiar fear.

“I was panicking at how much damage was done and what could be done,” she said. “If I wasn’t able to get it fixed, I was going to be in a world of hurt.”

On Sunday, Feb. 21, the weather broke and the sun came out. People danced salsa outside a bank downtown. But over on the west side, one of the poorest zip codes in the country, hundreds of cars lined up at the Good Samaritan Center on Saltillo Street over on the west side. Executive director Simón Salas scratched together three pallets of donated vegetables. On Monday, hundreds of meals came in from local restaurants that are part of World Central Kitchen. The line of cars stretched out, longer than the block is long.

“People have suffered,” said Salas. “People have been at differing levels of despair. It’s a memory but it’s never going to be forgotten.”

Even the people from the neighborhood who rely upon the center’s help pressed themselves into service. Alvaro Ferrer, 56, came in Tuesday after racing around looking for food and water, buying it out of his own pocket, and giving it out to neighbors, known and unknown alike. He and his family survived Covid-19 infections only to be hit with Uri, during which he took in grandchildren, children, boyfriends and even a homeless couple.

“I didn’t get no rest,” he said, sweating between delivery runs. “It was crazy.”

“I’ve been doing this 28 years, and it’s just heart-breaking. It’s so emotional,” said Eric Cooper, CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank, which became famous last year as photos of massive lines for food during the pandemic went viral.

On Monday, Feb. 22, after delivering food, Cooper drove away from an apartment complex for the elderly troubled by what he saw. Old people in need of medicine, water and food. Repairs that might, or might not, be adequately done by landlords.

“I drove away from the apartment complex feeling just frustrated. Frustrated,” Cooper told me. “This level of disaster is way too big for philanthropy. I’ve got chefs sleeping in kitchens. As for the people, when does a disaster victim become just another poor person?”

Cooper’s food bank normally feeds 900,000 people a week. But that number rose to well over 1 million people at least, according to Cooper. With little in grocery pantries, the food bank is relying on restaurant kitchens to donate individual prepared meals. But that covers one meal for one day. Private charities, like the Good Samaritan Center in West San Antonio are distributing as many as 500 sandwiches every five minutes without even publicizing it. Staples such as eggs, milk and tortillas are in short supply.

One woman I interviewed paid $12 for two dozen eggs. The Texas supermarket chain, H-E-B, headquartered in San Antonio, let people walk out with cartloads of free groceries. But price gouging is common, especially aimed at the poor and uninsured. The same woman who paid 50 cents an egg told me she paid someone $75 to repair her heater, but he did a bad job. Then he turned around and demanded $5,000 to replace it.

“I’m not doing it,” she told her adult son. “We’ll just freeze to death.”

So, FEMA has shipped generators, for example, but there is little need for them now that the power is back on. The usual National Guard and active military response is almost completely absent. At FEMA’s direction, the Air Force has been ferrying water from Joint Base Charleston, S.C. and Joint Base Travis, Calif., aboard C-17s to Texas, according to military officials. Marines in Fort Worth and Army troops here in San Antonio have handed out water on the order of local commanders. But that’s it. That’s all the military help there is.

Asked if the lack of military help, which was out in force during Ike and Harvey before, wasn’t coming because the governor hadn’t asked, a Defense Department official sheepishly responded: “I didn’t want to say that but yes. Usually, the governor asks for help.”

Critics of the governor see Abbott’s political ambitions at play. He is running for reelection and said to be eyeballing a presidential run. And so, the less he asks of the federal government the more he can claim in 2022 or 2024, that he doesn’t ask Washington for help. He can’t seem beholden to Washington, pressed from his right by hard-liners West, or his powerful right-wing lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick.

“Abbott doesn’t want to be seen with both hands out to the government,” said Henson, at the University of Texas. “If Republicans can get away with doing the bare minimum, they can have their cake and eat it, too.”

Biden will likely be confounded in Houston on Friday, touching down in a city that was struck by disaster just three and a half years ago. The balmy temperatures will conceal the lurking costs and the human impacts hidden inside homes, apartments and public housing.

“Using the high and low estimates to date, we estimate the loss in gross product over time to be between $85.8 and $128.7 billion, with lost income of $56.8 billion to $85.1 billion,” Ray Perryman, the most noted private economist in Texas told me. “These amounts are in the range of, and potentially above, the losses associated with Hurricane's Harvey and Ike.”

While the overall economy will bounce back quickly, some industries will never recover their losses, he added. Refineries that went offline on the Texas coast won’t get those lost shipments and revenue back. Insurance claims will soar and so will premiums, he said. Already-strapped state and local budgets will be tapped to somehow still pay for infrastructure damage, like potholed roads and busted mains.

Biden will be asked what the federal government can do to heal the harm the storm did. Less clear is whether he has the power to repair the broken trust between citizens who blame their government, not mother nature, for their misery.

“I was very angry with the government and the system for trying to kill us,” Williams, the hair stylist from Austin, told me. “Things in Texas need to change.”