I am in Texas, and it is bad. When we say we aren’t prepared for this type of weather, consider I have one neighbor who moved here from New York that owns a scraper for their windshield and a snow shovel. One. There are 800+ homes in my immediate neighborhood. I’ve never owned an ice scraper for my windshield here because I’ve never needed one. Ever. Been here for nearly 20 years.
The water, food, and gas situation is really, really bad. We are personally fine because, hello, covid prep. Minus gas. I’ve got about half a tank and my teen driver has about 3/4 of a tank. I work in healthcare, so this is a problem if we don’t get access to gas in the next 4-5 days.
The food shortage is a huge problem. Shelves are worse than they were during the initial covid panic-buying. I think it’s worse now because without power, even those who are normally stocked up are struggling and needing different types of food. People didn’t necessarily stock up for covid anticipating electricity being out.
The water issue is critical. There’s just zero excuse for the national guard and FEMA not already being on the ground distributing bottled water. None. The complete lack of local, state, and national leadership has been horrifying.
I am so, so thankful I’m a pretty catastrophic thinker. When covid hit, I prepared for... well, honestly, some sort of apocalypse. People laughed at me, but that’s ok. It helped my anxiety to have a plan if we lost power, water wasn’t safe to drink, gas stations were empty, grocery stores were empty, police weren’t able to respond to 911 calls, internet was down, etc.
I feel for those who aren’t the paranoid worry-wart type like me. People who have a day or two of food in the house and don’t think anything about it. People who rely on tap water being safe and always available and scoff at buying water or storing water.
Even with preparations, I’ve realized there’s more I should’ve done. The reality is, we cannot count on our government to help in a crisis in any sort of timely fashion. Ever. Whether it’s because they actually can’t (not the case here, but whatever) or because they just don’t care to or perhaps are just inept. We are all so dependent upon electricity, water, gas, phones, internet, etc. It’s scary.
In the meantime, I thought perhaps one silver lining would be people iced in at home would at least help out covid numbers. Alas, I think we’re in for another massive spike in a month or so. As one example, when the local grocery stores opened on day 3 of this mess, every single shopping cart was in use in under 5 minutes. Stores were a complete zoo. Families are piled into each other’s homes depending on who has electricity and/or water. So, I think ultimately this is going to be very bad for our covid numbers. We won’t see it for a bit. But it’s coming.
