Texas power outage and the lack of information

By now you’re probably aware that we had a ‘weather-related’ incident here in Texas as the energy industry, which effectively runs our state’s production and delivery infrastructure with minimal oversight, failed catastrophically when temperatures plummeted. That’s what most people are paying attention to right now but there’s another aspect to all this which was sobering for those of us on the information side.

As power and water went out, people naturally became concerned. And when people are concerned they lean heavily into their information networks for guidance, updates, connections and support. The local and state government, as well as the utilities’ responses were mixed at best. With power going, so went many people’s internet connection, forcing them to use smart phones. For those fortunate enough to have sufficient data plans there was then the challenge of maintaining battery charge. Easy enough perhaps if you own a functioning vehicle but again, not everyone does.

On top of this infrastructure problem however the information provided by government and utilities was a mix of confusion, deflection and just plain unhelpful. Forget that our governor used an appearance on television to go off topic on the ‘green new deal’ which had nothing to do with anything, we had confused messages that blackouts would be rolled so those without power now could anticipate the situation changing shortly as the pain was shared around. If you planned on that basis you were in for a rude awakening.

If you managed to keep access to the web, you could check the Austin Electric and Austin Water sites for updates, but there again we saw a display of data that offered less help than you might have wanted. Check out Austin Energy’s outage map:

I was trying to determine if an outage was coming my way but I have no idea what this was telling me, nor did anyone else with whom I shared it. I know my home is in one of those red wedges but……yeah, you figure it out. A supreme example of data yielding a pretty display but no actual information.

Austin Water has just updated there site to include a general outage map that is mildly more informative now that the worst has passed but in the midst of the mess this week, they went low-tech, offering a simple list of current outage location, vaguely described in terms of an address and intersection e.g., 18th and Harvey to MLK, plus estimated time of restoration. Unfortunately, while my water was off, there was no way any of the locations listed mapped to my address so I inferred that if I was within a few 100 meters of a listed one, that was the most likely. That did not really help as one neighbor and I were cut-off but no others seemed affected on my street, and there was no outage listed within half a mile of my address. I submitted my data point via the link to provide outage info, along with my requested number for a promised text update when service outage might be resolved but, yep, you guessed it, I never heard back.

If you gave up on the official channels and tried searching for yourself, you found that news media were a little behind the current situation, you were better of contacting people directly or networking via NextDoor or other local connections. But again, all this requires to you have service and a functioning device, something that is not equally distributed across the population, as we know. Vague utterances from politicians to ‘check the web’ were useless, and don’t get me started on official pronouncements to ‘boil water before drinking’ — pretty impossible to do if you had neither power nor water.

In short, despite the lessons of Katrina, Harvey and the like, we seem so ill-prepared to handle the information needs of ordinary citizens when their needs are greatest. I did get one robocall over the week. It was on my landline (yes, I still have one) from the police department telling us not to call them if we had water leaks, this was not deemed a cause for emergency. Ok, so the one clear message I received was the instruction on what I should not do. Got it! I don’t think any organization comes out of this looking good, thank goodness for neighbors.

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