Taylor Torres of San Antonio had an understandable reaction when she awoke in total darkness at 3 a.m. on Tuesday while sick with COVID and still without power in 12 degree weather.
“I ended up literally having a panic attack,” the 23-year-old lifelong Texan told The Daily Beast. “I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, what if the power never comes back on? What if I die here? I was so scared. It was so cold. It’s pitch black. I couldn’t see anything.”
Her parents and three younger sisters were sleeping by a fireplace in another part of the house, but she was quarantined in her room because of the virus.
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“I started to cry,” she said “I started to google ‘When is my power coming back on?’”
The crisis that now had 4 million Texans asking the same question had announced itself innocently enough to Torres on Monday morning. She had been sleeping off the continued effects of a week of COVID-19, when she suddenly snapped awake.
“I woke up and there was this blinding white light I’d never ever seen before,” she recalled.
She gazed out her bedroom window and realized it was the sun reflecting off more snow than she had ever seen.
“It was really what everybody thinks of when you hear the words ‘winter wonderland,’” she said.
But what at first seemed like an idyllic visitation from some northern clime took a worrisome turn when she began to notice changes in the sounds of the household beyond her bedroom door. She realized that the power was alternatingly going off for 45 minutes and then back on for 15.
The state’s power grid, which is administered by the unfortunately named Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), was having difficulty managing the sudden demand for heat preceded by the downing of more than 5,000 power lines in the storm. And because Texas did not want to be subject to federal regulation, it was not connected to grids in other states that could have accorded it emergency power.
The ERCOT tried to cope by imposing what it called “rolling blackouts,” but soon many houses had no power at all. Torres’ home was among them. Her room began to get colder and colder.
“I was shaking in my boots,” she reported. “Really shaking.”
Were it not for the virus, she and the rest of the family could have sought refuge at her grandmother’s house nearby. The grandmother lives in the more upscale neighborhood of Alamo Heights, which, coincidentally or not, still had power.
“You can definitely tell where the wealth gap is,” Torres said.
A similar suggestion of inequity in Texas was made to The Daily Beast by a family in Eulis outside Dallas that had four members with COVID, including a Marine veteran who had suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq. The Marine’s wife noted that nearby Highland Park, known as the local equivalent of Beverly Hills, was ablaze with light.
The ERCOT did not respond to a request for comment. Another question regarding the power-less and the power-full somebody should answer is why Twitter photos show the lit-up skylines of Houston, Dallas, and Austin at a time when Torres and millions of others were shivering in darkened homes.
“I did see the skylines, I’ve seen them all over social media,” Torres reported. “It’s just shameful. Like why are office buildings lit up while people are suffering in their homes?”
Twitter was also filled with images of car crashes on roads made treacherous by snow and ice. The danger prompted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to urge people to stay home and off the roads. He might have saved thousands of lives if he had been that quick to act in the face of the far greater danger of the pandemic. He took particular note of the Feb. 9 crash in Tarrant County involving some 130 vehicles that killed six people. He said nothing of the 36 people in Tarrant who died that day from COVID-19.
Torres had fallen ill on Feb. 8, likely catching the virus from one of the youngsters at the clinic for autistic children where she is a behavior technician.
“Very, very scary,” she later said of the disease. “Super scary when you start not being able to breathe right.”
She received an experimental medication intravenously and managed to avoid hospitalization. She had been in bed for a week when the fantastic blaze of morning light outside her window was followed by a deep chill in the darkness of her room. She tried to stay warm by pulling her head down through the neck of her sweater and eased her breathing by sleeping on her stomach.
Then came the 3 a.m. panic attack in total darkness. The power finally returned in the late afternoon after 36 hours. She dared hope she was through it, but then the ERCOT again proved how inappropriately it had been named.
“Lost power again,” Torres reported.
She prepared for another night in Texas of layer upon layer, topped by four blankets.
