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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

“Region struggles from weather it’s not used to”. That’s enough news for me.

Every region prepares for what they are likely to face. Florida prepares for hurricanes, California prepares for earthquakes. If a hurricane hit California, or a large earthquake hit Florida very bad things would happen.

Likewise the average in February high/low temperature for Austin TX is 65/45 F. They had no reason to prepare for a prolonged deep freeze that dipped as low as single digits.

...That is until it happened.

Your average is correct but the wrong metric. Austin has several times in the recient past got this cold, or so close as to be in any reasonable margin of error. When planning you need to ask about the expected range not average.

Last time Austin got down to these temperatures was 1989.

https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/TX/Austin/...

And one shouldn't plan one's long-lasting infrastructure for 30y events?

The last time winter shut down our power grid was 2011, and many of us called for ERCOT to be properly regulated then.

Yeah, that's a good distillation of what's going on. I think people have severely looked over just how significant this weather was and why it was really reasonable for engineers to not anticipate this situation.

What we really need to be reminded of is that this was caused by global warming stifling the typical northern jetstream. As long as global warming stays a problem, we will need to anticipate these types of extremes across the entire US.

I think it's more like the mainstream media downplayed just how significant and unusual this weather was for nakedly partisan reasons - specifically, to feed a bogus narrative that this happens every decade and Texas just doesn't fix the problem because they're a bunch of right-wing anti-government morons. It's hard to overstate just how awful and corrosive the current state of the US media is. I've seen people elsewhere insisting that their Texan acquaintances must've been brainwashed because they think this was a once in a lifetime occurrence. (Which it was.)

This might be once in a lifetime, but it isn't that far off from normal extreems

I think the median poster on HN was alive in 1989.

No-one should be surprised by a once-in-a-lifetime event. These are, by definition, not so rare that it is rational to ignore them.

Care to confirm my pet theory that you have working utilities and food at this time?

We'll have a whole lot more of that this century...

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