Blue States, Cold Hearts: Confronting the Frigid Response to the 2021 Texas Freeze

Credit: Graig Durant

It was the spring semester of my senior year of high school. Because of the way that Austin High’s COVID-19 pandemic policies were set up, I attended class on Zoom through the entire year. Trapped in my house one fateful afternoon, I scrolled aimlessly through the local news while ignoring my AP Chem class in a background tab. A headline caught my eye: “Tracking the Cold: When will the Arctic front arrive in Central Texas?” (Peña 2021).

The article warned that long-range climate models from the previous month, which had predicted an arctic blast arriving in Austin, were becoming more and more likely. The piece then gave a rough date range of the following week for the chill to hit the city. I didn’t think much of it. I’d lived in Minnesota for seven years of my life, so the temperatures that were predicted for that week seemed like child’s play.

Even when it started to snow a few days later, I didn’t think it’d be too much of a problem. I remember mocking some of my other Austinite friends who were complaining about how cold it was getting. I didn’t know how bad it would become.

The next morning, the first headline I saw when I woke up was about a 133-car pileup in Fort Worth caused by freezing rain and insufficient road preparedness (Cappucci 2021). It left six people dead. I stopped making fun of my friends who were scared of the cold at this point. It felt wrong.

A few days later, most of my friends lost power and/or water. I lost water, but we still had electricity. My best friend, Lili, didn’t. For more than 36 hours, her house was powerless and therefore without a working heater. My dad and I eventually had to drive over and pick her up so she could stay with us. On our way, none of the roads were plowed, no car dared to go faster than 15 miles per hour, and we passed two accidents on the side of the road that seemed to have been there for a while. Emergency responders were just too busy.

Lots of my friends had pipes that burst, cars that wouldn’t start, or heaters without electricity. When the power eventually did come back on and the snow melted, the scale of the damage was staggering. According to a report released by the City of Austin and Travis County, within the city alone the Austin Fire Department responded to 739 traffic accidents, the city received 2,449 reports of broken pipes, and Austin Energy reported that 40% of its customers lost power (for reference, in 2021, that meant roughly 208,000 of the company’s 520,757 households (Austin Energy 2021)). Statewide, there were $195 billion in damages, although how many billions of dollars it truly cost is still up for debate.

More important than the wrecked property, though, was the human toll. The state officially reported that 246 people died as a result of the freeze (Svitek 2022), although some estimates go as high as 814 (Weber & Buchele 2022). It’s hard to gauge a true count though, when the state government was trying to downplay the effect of both a hypercontagious virus and its own negligence in one breath.

The power grid had failed because of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which was formed in 1970 to consolidate Texas electric utilities outside the jurisdiction of federal regulators (Galbraith 2011). Unprepared, unconnected, and uncaring, ERCOT walked into the winter storm and left millions of Texans powerless for its duration, pocketing the spiked electric bill prices in the process. The Texas grid is outdated, out of step with federal regulations, and, as we’ve seen, unable to withstand a stress test.

The roads, bridges, and other infrastructure could’ve been winterized in the months leading up to this blizzard when long-term climate predictions saw it coming, but the state didn’t do that. The state’s Republican lawmakers had failed, and tragedy had ensued.

In light of all this, one might assume that the nation would sit in sympathy with the people whose houses were powerless, freezing, or flooding with burst pipes.

Social media had other ideas.

“I don’t understand why Texans are complaining so much, just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and solve the snow problem yourself,” another user wrote (Taylor 2021).

On TikTok, journalist Marcus DiPaola, then a major source of news on the app, belittled the state’s citizens when sharing his opinion about the freeze, concluding one video by saying “Enjoy your power blackouts, Texas. You voted for ’em.” (DiPaola 2021).

Never mind that, in the 2020 election, over 5.2 million Texans (47% of the vote) chose Joe Biden to be their next president (Astudillo 2020), or that Texas is the second most diverse state in the nation (McCann 2023), or that our government regularly enacts unpopular and inequitable policies for the gain of some oil executives (Douglas 2021). All that most people see is a historically red state with an ineffective and hypocritical government, and so they blame Texans for their situation.

There’s this common idea, especially among many liberals and self-proclaimed progressives, that Southern red states are monoliths of racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-government, pro-gun violence, anti-abortion crazies who want what’s worst for everyone involved. Humans like to believe in “good guys” and “bad guys,” and we like to think that good guys get rewarded, and bad guys get punished. So if a red state suffers because of its conservative policies, it’s the universe exacting some sort of sick karma. 

But there are many problems with this way of thinking. For one, as stated above, the South is far from monolithic. It’s one of the most (if not outright the most) culturally diverse places in the country, with plenty of liberals, leftists, and everything else under the sun. But even in the reddest, 100% Republican areas of Southern states, the people are still people. They don’t deserve to freeze in their homes, or slide off the road, or drown in insurance fees after their pipes explode. Conservative lawmakers, think tanks, and power players have mastered the art of convincing people to vote against their own interests and to do so with pride. There is little to no access to education, reliable news media, or ideological diversity in much of these deep red areas of Texas and states like it. How, then, can we blame these people for the greedy and negligent decision-making of the politicians and oil barons who have used them to get power?

My three years at Wesleyan have shown me that this sort of reductive, cold-hearted rhetoric doesn’t just exist in social media, but in common conversation, too. Three separate people at this school have, at different points in time, expressed to me that Texas “deserved” to freeze, or that the people of the state had it coming.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you, too, have done something to this effect. I’ve done it too. It’s a horrible instinct, but an understandable one. Beyond our brain’s inclination to believe in some sort of punishment for the foolish red-state losers, a lot of the media we consume loves to paint the South as uniquely and entirely filled with these foolish red-state losers. 

The South doesn’t deserve divine punishment. It’s cruel to think it does. But if we as a community try to change the way we think about places like Texas, and if we start thinking about how we can empower the South’s disenfranchised, voiceless, and downtrodden victims of corruption, gerrymandering, and misinformation, we can start to actually make meaningful change.

Bibliography

Astudillo, Carla. 2020. “Here are the Texas 2020 election results.” Texas Tribune, November 3, 2020. https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/general-election-results/.

Austin Energy. 2021. “Austin Energy By the Numbers.” https://austinenergy.com/about/company-profile/numbers.

Cappucci, Matthew. 2021. “133-car pileup on Fort Worth highway during freezing rain leaves at least 6 dead.” Washington Post, February 11, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/11/fort-worth-highway-pileup-ice/.

City of Austin & Travis County. 2021. 2021 Winter Storm URI After-Action Review: Findings Report. https://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/HSEM/2021-Winter-Storm-Uri-AAR-Findings-Report.pdf.

DiPaola, Marcus (@marcus.dipaola). 2021. “The stars at night are big and bright *clapclapclapclap* deep in the heart of Texas!” TikTok, February 16, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@marcus.dipaola/video/6929997638594989318.

Douglas, Erin. 2021. “Texas Legislature advances bills to shield oil and gas from climate initiatives.” Texas Tribune, May 3, 2021. https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/03/texas-house-fossil-fuel-oil-divest/. 

Galbraith, Kate. 2011. “Texplainer: Why does Texas have its own power grid?” Texas Tribune, February 8, 2011. https://www.texastribune.org/2011/02/08/texplainer-why-does-texas-have-its-own-power-grid/.

Hardy, Michael. 2021. “Ted Cruz Abandons Millions of Freezing Texans and His Poodle, Snowflake.” Intelligencer, February 19, 2021. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/02/ted-cruz-flees-texas-for-cancun-ditches-family-poodle.html?fbclid=IwAR39LPHwfnqUQPO4S7YsilDI4RsZ6KMxfaQWh1eFdnha1Q98mhk3LlABneU.

McCann, Adam. 2023. “Most & Least Diverse States in America.” WalletHub, September 20, 2023. https://wallethub.com/edu/most-least-diverse-states-in-america/38262.

Peña, Mark. 2021. “Tackling the Cold: When will the Arctic front arrive in Central Texas?” KXAN, February 9, 2021. https://www.kxan.com/weather/arctic-front-will-likely-bring-extended-cold-weather-to-central-texas/.

Svitek, Patrick. 2022. “Texas puts final estimate of winter storm death toll at 246.” Texas Tribune, January 2, 2022. https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/02/texas-winter-storm-final-death-toll-246/.

Taylor, James (@jamestaylor17). 2021. “I don’t understand why Texans are complaining so much, just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and solve the snow problems yourself.” Twitter, February 16, 2021, 12:19PM, https://twitter.com/jamesetaylor17/status/1361726980048224257?s=20. 

Weber, Andrew, and Mose Buchele. 2022. “Texas has an official death count from the 2021 blackout. The true toll may never be known.” Texas Standard, August 5, 2022. https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/texas-freeze-winter-storm-2021-death-count/.