Texas Global Warming -- February 15 - February 18, 2021 -- For The Archives

Bloomberg called this recent bit of global warming that hit Texas a crisis.

Several things. 

First, let's put this in perspective.

Let's put this in the "energy crisis" folder. Compare it Three Mile Island and Fukishima. Need I say more? The way the media played it, I thought it was worse than both TMI and F combined.

Second, consider it from the personal element. Compare the hardships suffered by an individual in Texas over the past four days with  a POW in Vietnam. Need I say more?

And if that's a bit crazy, then compare it with the typical hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast every summer.  Compared to a Louisiana hurricane on a scale from one to ten, the recent snow event was  ... maybe ... a one. 

For me, this started at 2:00 a.m. Monday morning, February 15, 2021. By Thursday, 2:00 p.m., February 18, 2021, it was all over. 

The roughnecks in the Bakken experience worse for weeks on end. 

Now, this. 

Bloomberg called it a crisis. Permian production was down 25% or thereabouts. No one knew the real number; everyone was simply pulling numbers out of the air. 

This is when I knew it was not a crisis. When I saw the price of oil -- WTI -- actually drop on the fourth day of this crisis. The second clue? The market did not correct.

On another note, these events are incredibly important. Wise folks learn from them. 

What I found most amazing was how incredible our apartment complex managers were. The complex is composed of twenty buildings, each with ten units. The manager and the second-in-charge, are two very young women. This is probably their first crisis, as Bloomberg described it. And they came through with flying colors. They made sure all tenants were safe. They stayed on campus 24/7 and had the chief of maintenance remain on campus 24/7 as well. They helped tenants with alternate places to re-locate when it simply got too cold to remain in the apartment. Most amazing, they minimized flood damage and had arranged for outside contractors to help restore apartments to pre-flood conditions. I honestly thought this was going to last a minimum of two weeks; in fact, it was less than 24 hours of true inconvenience. And even that was a stretch. 

I would write much more but Sophia wants me to watch Shrek 2 with her, and I'm using a cellphone hotspot to keep connected to the internet, and I've just been "throttled." LOL.

What a great country! What a great state! Almost as great as North Dakota. 

By the way, we still don't have internet (Spectrum). I have an "affordable" cell phone plan which throttles me if I use too much cellular as opposed to wi-fi. But this week I had little choice. And you know what? Throttling is at best an irritation. This technology simply blows me away. Remember: my grandparents had a "party line" for a telephone when I visited them at age five. Now, I can "surf the net" using a cell phone as a hot spot.