I was there last weekend & for the day of the hurricane. This was just a cat 1 hurricane at the time it passed through Houston, and there was SO much damage. I can't imagine the city is remotely prepared for (god forbid, and idk how likely it is that far inland anyway) a cat 4 or 5. We were staying in a hotel that had a backup generator, but every single other building that was visible from our hotel had lost power during the storm.
Everyone I talked to in the area lost power at home for at least a day, and many people said they expected to lose power for a full week.
I'm interested if anyone familiar with the local state of the grid knows whose "fault" the enormous turnaround time in restoring power is:
* Not enough employees at the electrical companies
* Infrastructure regulation (e.g. requiring buried lines in critical areas) is insufficient in Houston specifically
* Infrastructure regulation is insufficient in Texas specifically
* (or nationally? are there national guidelines for the power grid in various weather-prone areas?)
* The Texas grid being separate from the rest of the country's
* Other??
This wasn't a "grid issue." It is a last-mile issue.
It's specifically an issue with the sheer amount of above ground power lines and population density. There is no easy fix, preparation, or practically anything else that can be done to prevent something like this. Plus, what causes the same amount of power outages (wind damage) isn't going to be different between 90mph winds and 150 mph winds. The effects are going to be the same on the power infrastructure.
The hurricane, while even a Cat 1, still brought what would effectively be a localized extremely severe thunderstorm over vast swaths of, and a direct hit upon, major population areas over the 4rd largest city in the country.
New Orleans was in the same boat with Ida in 2021. There were areas of the city that didn't get power back for over a month. Everyone was furious with Entergy there, but there's just a simple reality with this stuff.
What's wrong with below-ground power distribution for metropolitan areas?
Nothing, but migrating to it is very expensive.
Centerpoint, the physical electricity provider in Houston, has said it would cost $2.5M per square mile. Houston is 640 square miles. Regulations allow them to claw back costs on the bills. (For example, repairs from past storms are often paid for over the course of several years in the form of a bond that is applied to customers as surcharges)
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/cen...
Funny to think about these costs and the health of the national commons from a point of view of the Federal budget.
For example, you point out it would cost 2 billion to migrate Houston's above-ground to storm proof below ground.
If we could lop off 1/4 of the DoD and intelligence budget of $1T/yr and dedicate it to infrastructure, we could pay for 125 Huston-scale improvement projects per year. And still have the most expensive DoD in the world! But that would be misguided for "national security".
Plus the Federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed, where such value is incarnated via the wealth of the commons, where such wealth is most truly incarnated by infrastructure.
But for unknown reasons, such pragmatism is politically untenable.
It's amusing and a bit scary that someone thinks the federal budget is essentially free money, constructed as needed.
It's free if you spend it on a durable asset that is as or more valuable than the cash was, which can often be true of infrastructure. Your balance sheet goes up not down after the spend then.
There are vanishingly few examples of infrastructure spending that don't turn into massive, wasteful boondoggles; perhaps the Interstate Highway system.
The national railroad system a century prior and even the Internet were nearly entirely built with private funds.
Railroads got massive subsidies in at least two forms: huge land grants, and the power of the U.S. Army to wage war on the native peoples who otherwise would have stood in their way.
I thought by the time the railroad came about the US army already did that for the various ranch lands the railroad went through?
The interstate highway system is arguably a massively wasteful boondoggle - it subsidises trucks at the cost of the far more efficient and less-polluting rail.
Huge military boon having the interstate as well for our icbm truck platforms.
The US dollar literally is constructed as needed. It's pretty darn close to free thanks to electronic banking.
However, like all magic, using it has severe (and generally predictable) consequences.
Unlike fictional magic, the consequences take 4 years to kick in like clockwork. That, and the US's two term limit meant that presidents get to print money without political consequence. Worst case, they lose the midterms, then run again while blaming the next guy for the problem they created.
Hypothetically, of course.
jfc you're like the spiritual avatar of /r/confidentiallyincorrect.
Presidents don't print money. Congress approves stimuli in the form of spending. Spending is always inflationary in nature because it injects money into the economy.
The Federal Reserve, nearly completely independent (for better or worse) from the Executive and Legislative branches, prints money in the form of quantitative easing and controls other levers through lending and interest rate strategies.
Houston is having some budget issues currently: <https://abc13.com/houston-budget-mayor-john-whitmire-city-se...>
How much should the states bail out mismanaged cities? How much should the Federal Government bail out mismanaged states? Budgets aren't "free money" as you assert.
The general problem states see is that metropolitan regions are more productive and produce more taxes, so in many cases the state cannot necessarily wash its hands of cities.
The largest municipal fiscal crises in the nation so far have been NYC in the ‘70s and Detroit. There is also the case of Puerto Rico, although one could argue the feds have more culpability there since its status as a non-state subject to federal laws makes a lot of avenues for resolving crises illegal.
The State of Texas had a budget of $188 billion [1].
In 2023 they projected a surplus of $18 billion [2].
Maybe they can budget it in?
What the federal government versus state governments should pay for is a big can of worms, but I'm not sure why it seems so easy to just look at the DoD budget and says "there's money there let's use that" as if it's not doing anything or it's all waste. If anything (unfortunately) the DoD budget probably needs to be increased quite a bit given the geopolitical challenges we face.
[1]. https://everytexan.org/2023/11/03/the-2024-25-texas-budget-t...
[2] https://abc13.com/texas-legislature-2023-state-budget-surplu...
It is $2.5 million per mile. That is order of magnitude more expensive. Houston has 6200 miles of road compared to 640 square miles.
I think $2.5 million is the high estimate, my city is estimating $1 million per mile.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/ar...
There is no scenario where every mile of road is outfitted with buried power lines, especially considering not every mile of road has elevated power lines. What a nonsensical comment.
Centerpoint website states that they currently operate ~33,000 miles of above ground distribution/transmission lines.
https://www.centerpointenergy.com/en-us/corporate/about-us/c...
There actually are a few problems with underground power lines, notably that maintenance & upgrades are much harder and more expensive, they tend to get severed by construction, they tend to get severed by earthquakes, and bad things result if the waterproof conduit around them is punctured.
On balance I think they're probably worth it for areas prone to wildfire, but undergrounding all power lines is not a panacea, and there are a lot of hidden costs to undergrounding that become apparent only after they get old and you have to do maintenance.
In European cities where underground power lines are normal these issues aren't a problem.
There might be costs (checking before construction for example) and it being normal it helps.
There are about 3844 people per square mile in Houston, so that's $650 per person, amortized over at least 20 years, which would increase the monthly power bill by about $2.70 per person (~ $10 / subscriber?)
I'd guess that's less expensive than throwing out everything in the fridge / freezer every few years.
Also less expensive than everybody going out and buying a generator, plus putting out fires from improperly stored gasoline.
It seems like a lot, but a few billions of dollars also seems like a good deal to secure against increasing risks for severe weather. What's the total economic impact of future storms? To put it in perspective a single Patriot missile battery costs about a billion dollars and a single missile costs $4M.
Penny-wise, pound foolish. This single 1 week power outage is going to cost Houston a lot more than $1.6B.
Houston is gigantic.
Maintaining underground infrastructure can be very difficult.
https://practical.engineering/blog/2021/9/16/repairing-under...
Berlin, 3.645M citizen, everything underground. Houston, 2.302M citizen, ... "gigantic"
Berlin also has the advantage, being generous on “advantage”, of being completely rebuilt about 70 years ago.
When did the explosion of Houston's size and city take place? pre- or post 1945?
A wave in the 60’s for oil & space, then more burbs and exurbs when the bible belters migrated to TX in the 80’s.
https://www.strongtowns.org/
Some of both but mostly post-45.
The quip is that two things made Houston possible: oil and air conditioning.
It's not a matter of population, but land. Berlin is about 345 square miles; Houston is 640.
Berlin including suburbs ("Speckgürtel") is ~1400 square miles.
If you includes the suburbs, the Houston area is roughly 10,000 square miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston#Geography
So approximately 1/7th the size of the Houston metro area.
And thus their additional challenges are caused by their absolute neglect of urban planning. If only someone could have predicted that spreading single family housing over hundreds of square miles was going to create a maintenance nightmare.
Berlin, Germany is inland, with an elevation average around 34 meters above sea level. The ground soil composition in Berlin is primarily sandy, draining easily and lending itself exceptionally well to underground infrastructure development.
Houston, Texas, is coastal and has an elevation that averages around 13 meters above sea level. The ground composition in Houston is primarily made up of clay. Houston soil is notoriously heavy and has issues with drainage in construction. It's poorly suited for underground infrastructure development.
you haven't seen the soil drainage pipes of Berlin? They're like a screensaver from the 1990s escaped into the real world.
Do you mean heating pipes? Or construction drainage pipes?
How about Amsterdam, or London (outer London if you want a lower density).
There always seems to be an excuse as to why America is exceptional and things accomplished routinely in other countries couldn't possibly work here. It's true to a degree. They absolutely cannot work here. But that's more about our political dysfunction than anything meaningful about our geographical situations.
When people are talking about Houston they are talking about Greater Houston: 7.5M people over 10,000 square miles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Houston
This is silly. MSAs have near zero to do with a city.
They are not talking about Greater Houston.
For comparison, let's look at the Seattle metropolitan area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area)
It includes Mt Rainier, which NO-ONE in the area would say is "in Seattle".
It includes Bainbridge Island in Kitsap County, same.
Glacier Peak, in the Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest, also definitely not "in Seattle".
Mount Vernon, Olympia, North Bend, no-one would remotely call these "in Seattle".
Not even for the purposes of international news and geolocation, they'd be "near" at best.
To my point if you told residents of College Station or Galveston that they were just a part of Houston they’d look at you funnily.
It's just more of our "America is unique, solutions that work elsewhere can't work here", and Texas likes to do that on a state level.
Fun detail, most Texans, and many Americans, believe that the King Ranch is the largest cattle ranch in the world.
Except... it's not. Anna Station in Australia is over six times larger, larger than Israel.
In fact, if you put King Ranch in Australia, it'd only be the seventy-fourth largest ranch in that country.
The reality is far more mundane and depressing: there's a resistance to fixing some of these things because it'd mean acknowledging that mistakes had been made or "your way" of doing things is not the right or best one. And for far too many people, they'd sooner freeze to death than admit that.
Even Wikipedia doesn’t include College Station
Greater Berlin also is much bigger than Berlin.
As I understand it, the topsoil in parts of Texas is only a foot deep or less and then it's solid bedrock. This is why most homes do not have basements.
That’s not true in all of Texas for sure. I can vouch for it in Central Texas “hill country” 6-10”around my home and you will hit solid limestone. Makes a nice home foundation (provided it’s not too porous)but I would not want to pay for a pool or basement here.
Moles, mice, things walking/driving over the top. There is a long list of things that make underground not nearly as reliable as it sounds.
Underground electric distribution is considerably more reliable than overhead lines. Animals digging up the wire is much more rare than an outage created by an animal crawling up a pole and grabbing the line/transformer.
Underground electric is quite widely used in the Midwest and is cost effective vs. overhead lines even in sparsely populated rural areas.
Below-ground power distribution is cheaper in sparsely-populated rural areas than overhead lines because utility companies can trench the lines directly through anyone's field or in any random ditch - there's no directional boring required (until customer delivery possibly.)
Add in the fact that you no longer risk trees taking down lines when they are unkempt and ice-covered and it is probably much cheaper.
Doesn’t seem like it would be cheaper anywhere.
Source? The grid was far more reliable where I've lived with underground than overhead lines. Kind of hard to believe. Sounds like that would only happen if your city cheaped out on the conduit material.
Been thirty years since I lived there, but when I lived where there was a coop electric they had data showing underground was overall less reliable. Maybe things are diffarant now.
I wonder if anyone has started an environmental impact statement about burying lines. For example squirrels, possums, etc use them as bridges over streets, birds use them as observation/socialization spaces, especially some flocks of migratory grackles (maybe?) that have a giant winter rookery on the lines around a grocery store.
There's nothing wrong with it. But it would take lifetimes of money and time to retrofit a city like Houston to move all power infrastructure underground. And there is no way consumers would ever sign up for the cost to do so. It would be akin to building the Hoover Dam today. It would probably be one of the largest public works projects ever attempted.
Lifetimes of money, really? What is that measurement? Someone above said 2.5 million per square miles. Catastrophic damage from larger storms is often in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars, so it feel like it would be in the best interest of most parties to embark on this project, even if it happens slowly.
Putting power lines underground wouldn't mitigate very much of that damage though, would it? I was under the impression that the vast majority of those multibillion dollar figures is water damage to buildings, cars, and other equipment.
Just one anecdote. We lived through the deracho in Iowa, one of the places hardest hit. Huge swaths of the city was without power for weeks. In our house, in the middle of the most damage, was without power for under 24 hours. That's a massive difference. I don't know how much the calculations take into account physical damage versus all up damage including lost productivity. But many of the folks working at the local company were back "in the office" working from home because the business was without power far longer than most of the employees. I have no idea how the overall damages are calculated.
The poster above misstated the cost. Its $2.5mil/mile. That number actually comes from PG&E in California, so its possibly not relevant to Houston. I couldn’t find that Centerpoint has actually done an analysis for Houston. Just to get an idea of scale, Centerpoint states on their website that they operate ~33,000 miles of above ground power lines.
Source: https://www.khou.com/article/news/news-explainers/the-why/ho...
A lifetime of money is ~$10M or so. That's $100k/year for 100 years.
It’s not lifetimes of money, but there are substantial costs.
All of the existing distribution conductors need to be buried either by trenching or directional boring, all of the pole-mounted transformers need to be replaced with pad-mounted transformers , and all of the customer service drops need to be converted from overhead to underground.
In another post, someone said about $2.5M per square mile, which isn’t actually all that much money. If you figure half labor and half material costs (fairly standard for electrical construction) and labor costs of $100/hr (IBEW 66 journeyman lineman), that’s 12,500 hours of labor, or a 6.25 person crew for one year to convert one square mile, and Houston is 637 square miles.
~4,000 person years of labor, 400 full time linemen could do the whole city in 10 years.
New Orleans and Houston are basically built on swamps. In New Orleans, you can’t even bury people below ground, so I doubt you can do much with power lines underground.
In Amsterdam the ground water level is also very high but people manage to put lines in the ground
So this is weird, but I never saw people buried above ground in Amsterdam like in New Orleans. What the diff? Even if cremation is common now, it probably wasn’t a hundred or two years ago?
It turns out we don't need to speculate:
https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/64650dded34ec179a83...
Most of the wells they sampled are > 100 ft above the water table. Some are as low as 12. The lowest is 2.83ft. Here's the relevant bit of the schema XML document for the CSV the produced:
I used to live in a neighboring parish to the west of New Orleans. If you dug more than 3 feet into the ground, you were hitting water. Driving pilings is a sloppy mess.
Swamp is a poor excuse IMHO. Plenty of my city Christchurch is built on swamp. yet it has slowly been replacing HV and LV power poles with underground cabling for about 50 years now, although there is still some remaining. We don't get hurricanes so I'm not sure of reasons for us using underground cabling. NZ is no where near as wealthy as Texas so Houston should be able to afford to do it too.
Christchurch gets earthquakes instead of hurricanes: http://db.nzsee.org.nz/SpecialIssue/44(4)0425.pdf
I'm getting strong "'No way to prevent this' says only country where this regularly happens" vibes.
I think "vibes" is a new weasel word that subtly absolves the author from any responsibility to connect cause and effect. There's a whole lot more to writing than announcing what "vibes" you get.
I understand what they meant.
It's funny to me that folks counter criticism of Texas by saying lefty California also has outages. It's like, sure, they do -- so why not show that a right-wing government can do better? What is the actual point of the counterargument?
I’m not an electrical or civil eng, but I imagine it’s very expensive to dig so many tunnels.
Groundwater (especially for coastal cities) and people drilling holes would be very problematic too.
Assuming you don't hit rock, it's not bad.
Power lines that are rated for conduit burial (which implies indefinite direct submersion in water is fine -- conduits leak, even if they're not supposed to) are readily available and not particularly expensive vs. above ground lines. Most of the cost is in the conductor, and that's the same either way.
If memory serves me right, you need to trench 6ft (which is usually done with a backhoe that has a narrow bucket and straddles the trench), then place a PVC pipe to act as conduit and fill the trench. The last step is using a (typically) pickup-truck mounted cable puller to pull the line through the conduit.
If the wire fails, you can pull it out and put a new one in without retrenching.
When you bury the conduit, you also bury a piece of warning cloth about one foot above it. If you see that while digging, then you should stop digging. (Also, call the "call before you dig" number before you dig.)
There are also trenchless systems that I've seen used for fiber optic cables. It's basically a tiny little boring machine (like they use to bore holes for tunnels) on the end of a cable. One person steers the boring machine, and the other stands above ground with a metal detector that tells them where it is, and how deep.
"not an electrical or civil eng. So let me explain how impossible everything is that I don't know about, and snidely say it's just 'physics'".
Much more expensive to install and maintain, and while risk from wind and rain is lessened, you add the risk of any below ground construction accidentally severing cables.
Above ground you have the risks of e.g. cars crashing into poles and trees falling on the cables.
"There is no easy fix" underground power lines for an entire city isn't easy.
It's time consuming and expensive to implement due to a mix of property rights and construction.
Isn't there a third option: redundant overhead power lines?
In the transmission (long haul) part of the grid, there's already a lot of redundancy. But not as much in the distribution (last mile) part.
If you increase redundancy, you should be more resilient to e.g. trees knocking out power lines because there are multiple paths in more parts of the network.
I doubt full redundancy (two lines to every customer) would be realistic, but an increase in redundancy seems like a more practical way forward than just starting over completely with underground lines.
Standard in most of Europe.
What I've always heard whenever this subject comes up in Houston is that A) burying lines is expensive (and Houston is very large), and B) Houston floods a lot.
I disagree, and I speak from experience.
We've been repeatedly hit by climate-change induced typhoons here (near the SF Bay Area), and hurricane-force gusts hit both of the last two years. Our area looses a lot of roads to mudslides, and of course we have extended power outages.
Having said that, the first year, PG&E only delivered one nine of availability last year, and this year, they're closer to two nines.
The difference is that they actually trimmed the trees (residents have been asking for this for years), and they replaced most of the Regan-era telephone poles (the old ones had bent into all sorts of interesting arcs, and the data lines used be held up by being tied to nearby tree branches).
So, for a Cat-1 to be as bad as it is in Texas, I assume the issue there is the same as here in California: Graft at the utility company, and corruption at the state house.
We know for sure that Texas has these issues because they continue to refuse to winterize the grid. They could do so at minimal cost -- I think they just have to buy more expensive grease and install insulation sleeves when they run above ground pipes -- and the vast majority of states in the US do this. As a result, every time they get a 10-year snow storm the whole state loses power (and those storms are probably now 1-5 year storms thanks to climate change). This has been a well-publicized problem there since at least the 1990's, so they've had more than enough time to fix it.
The last time they had a big winter storm, the power outage cascaded to a catastrophic failure at a refinery that feeds 20% of global PVC production. This is why you couldn't get materials to repair drainage or plumbing during the tail end of covid.
As to your point about it being an urban area:
The higher the population density, the easier the technical challenges become for this stuff. The amount of line to maintain per customer drops, and so does the density of hazardous trees, landslides, etc. The main challenges are around permitting, etc, but those processes are supposedly very lax in Texas (which is a good thing IMO).
I do agree they should be burying lines whenever possible. Everyone should do that. Modern equipment means it's a lot easier than you'd think.
You lost me at “climate change induced typhoon”.
Comparing an “Bay Area typhoon” (very hilly) to low and flat Houston with a direct hit is disingenuous at best.
The elevation of Houston is _higher_ than the elevation of SF. Yes, there are many hills, and the _max_ elevation is obviously higher, but there are also plenty of low lying areas and areas at sea level.
Nonetheless, there are no recorded instances of large storm-induced floods in the SFBay area that I'm aware of. Do you know of any?
Fires, earthquakes, heavy rains causing mudslides that have actually killed people: yes. Some very localized flooding around the Russian River happens all the time. The Guadalupe River in San Jose flooded a few years ago. But storm surge from the ocean? nope, nope.
There was a pretty bad flooding event portrayed in the documentary movie San Andreas.
https://youtu.be/jvIGFhqbe0c?si=ZCaVjWjw-oi84HgD&t=1m39s
You're calling it a "documentary movie"?
Just because he didn't add /s doesn't mean it's not implied
you never know what someone thinks /s. There's another guy here claiming there are supernatural phenomena.
And there are also people who are big talkers but can't defend their "non-supernatural" claims when challenged.
oh, you're just so busy here, aren't you?
we don't have to prove the negative; you have to prove your claim.
Impressive, but fairly normative[1] rhetoric[2].
Can you please take that courage over to the thread in question, where the cat seems to have gotten your tongue?
Some alternatives:
1. Engage in even more rhetoric (which is easily identified)
2. Pretend that you have not seen this comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954874
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn...
Note:
- you and I are both Humans
- this conversation is "a situation"
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
Nah, I was just pushing back on the notion that Houston is that much “lower” than SF, when it is not. Wild to get downvoted for that factual statement.
Hills make a huge difference impeding winds across the land, storm water drains much faster. Has a hurricane ever hit San Francisco? It’s not a real comparison, typhoons in the area, to a direct hurricane.
It’s also extremely expensive to mitigate, maybe it should be done, but the GP was hand waving it all away. Commenter even “disagreed from experience” and then cited a totally different experience.
True, but none of that contradicts what I said.
Don't worry, he saw a clogged storm drain in Pac Heights once, he's got this.
He does speak from experience!
I was laughing too. Yes the legendary typhoons slamming into SF yearly, how could I forget.
To quantify the winds we're talking about, the record-setting winds in the Bay Area this February peaked at 100mph gusts, with 18 stations recording values between 80mph and 100mph [0] (Pablo Point, out in the middle of the Pacific, recorded gusts of 102mph, but I'd consider that an outlier). Notably, all stations recording values higher than 80mph are on mountain peaks, not anywhere near population centers. In most of the Bay Area the gusts didn't exceed 60mph [1].
During Hurricane Beryl, 17 weather stations in the (very flat) Houston area recorded wind gusts in excess of 100mph. 30 stations recorded gusts in excess of 90mph [2]. Beryl's sustained winds were about 65mph, in excess of the gusts that most of the Bay Area experienced in that February storm.
All of which is to say: other commenters are right, it's useless to look at what you experienced in the Bay Area and compare it to even a small hurricane.
[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/02/05/map-where-wind-reache...
[1] https://underscoresf.com/the-belated-weekend-catch-up-record...
[2] https://houstonlanding.org/these-houston-areas-received-the-...
Consider earthquakes. Preparation and infrastructure are what matter. If you don't do the prep, you'll have a hundred thousand dead from a 6.0. But if you do the prep, you'll have relatively trivial damage from a 7.0.
Texas power, thanks to their 'we don't need no regulamazations' attitude, has shown itself to be woefully underreported repeatedly in the last few years.
I can't walk by this comment without noting that their 'we don't need no regulamazations' attitude resulted in a large populous state which people want to migrate to. The other large US state, California, has electricity prices that appear to be 2x higher [0]. And their migratory trends are not encouraging.
People underestimate the heavy burden of a strong regulatory state. High standards and high costs. All in it the Texas approach looks to be pretty good even if it means you have to be prepared for an emergency. I actually lost power for 24 hours recently so I can sympathise; a widespread outage would be horrific for an unprepared person. But being prepared for emergencies is a much more resilient approach in the long term and better than the quite substantial risk of overregulating.
They have a very healthy attitude.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
It's not a simple linear scale of regulations and no regulations.
EU is arguably more regulated than California, but the regulations here have more sense to them, and arguably higher benefit to cost ratio.
The last time I checked the EU appeared to be in a full-blown multi-country energy crisis triggered by some of the most stunning displays of regulatory incompetence so far this century. So I would accept that the EU is more regulated but I don't think that is the sort of point that plays well right now.
I would be fighting tooth-and-nail to have my country not do what Germany did. The Texas grid, by comparison, looks like a paradise even if it is currently experiencing a week-long outage!
"would be fighting tooth-and-nail to have my country not do what Germany did. The Texas grid, by comparison, looks like a paradise even if it is currently experiencing a week-long outage!"
Can you clarify such strong words? I've never encountered any power outtage in Germany my whole life and Texas this looks fairly regular.
The EU had an energy crisis because Germany was high on Russian gas, along with most of Central Europe. Thankfully the US took care of that. Southern Europe also has few fossil fuel options if Libya and Algeria decide to align themselves with Russia.
The EU also has very high taxes and very high energy costs.
No outage though, the crisis was averted, unlike in Texas where the crisis reliably hits every few years.
Bass ackwards defensive hot take.
The above comment should not be grayed out, yours should.
You are placing your political fantasies above reality on the ground.
It is absolutely factually correct to describe Texas political and electrical administration as - anthropogenic climate change denialist
- corruptly in thrall to fossil fuel, including 'natural' gas plant expansion where the actual grid is the issue
- averse to integrating with the electrical grid from nearby states, as others do, and averse to standards and standards compliance.
The number of people moving to Texas and your instant deflection towards California bashing are unacceptable in a mature conversation on this topic.
And
Seem at odds with one another.
Power costs are the result of private profit taking not electrical regulation. Look at power costs for municipal providers with the same regulatory burden. LADWP customers are paying maybe 16 cents a kilowatt hour.
Houston actually has relatively low population density compared to other metro areas with only 3,842 people per square mile, and across the MSA (Houston is extremely spread out), that number is much lower. (Compare to, for example, Union City, NJ, with 54,138 persons/sq mile.) There are some 7.5 million people spread out across more than 10,000 square miles across the greater Houston area.
Also, the water table is very high, and hurricanes completely flood entire areas, so transformers etc are often completely underwater. It's just not feasible to bury sensitive equipment when the entire area is under six or ten feet of water.
TLDR Texas is hosed as climate change accelerates and there is no will to pay to build resilient infra. Godspeed y’all.
Did you read OP's post?
Yes. I am also familiar with the technical challenges and cost of improving last mile electrical distribution to withstand hurricane force conditions where burial is not an option (whether because of a high water table or potential surge conditions, where equipment is suspended at a height above ground level on permanent scaffolding or pedestals). It is expensive, not impossible. It is a choice, and there is a cost. It’s cold, hard economics. The politics are whether to spend or not spend, and the outcome of that decision.
Citations:
https://www.marketplace.org/2024/07/12/texas-power-grid-hous...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/ar...
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1558514
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/060624_GD...
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/why-cant-texas-bu...
I don't think it's really possible to predict what will become of Texas. One could imagine such a big, resource-rich state finding ways to work collectively for the better of all, though obviously that's naive to the point of nearly being a joke. Still there is a lot going for it in some sense. Politicians may not care about the people, but their beloved businesses also need infrastructure, so at least there's that.
I've lived in Texas my entire life and there are aspects of it that I love, but I do have vague plans to move north once my remaining ties to the state dissolve.
Would you bet your financial success or life outcome on Texas making rational policy leading to potentially more favorable outcomes for its citizens (based on all available evidence)?
And the flood zone maps are out of date and were not really accurate to begin with and they are purposely not updated.
What are climate-change induced typhoons? How are those quantified?
I also wondered this. How do you tell the difference between a climate change induced typhoon and the alternative? Maybe its obvious to the down voters, but you have at least two people here you could potentially teach something to.
You don't - that's the point.
You use statistics.
Demanding the answer for specific storms is like demanding to know whether a smoker's lung cancer was caused by smoking. Maybe?? But we know in aggregate smoking caused an enormous amount of deaths. We can measure the number of smoking-induced deaths, and the number of climate-changed-induced storms.
I understand the concept, but please show me the statistics that show that storms are increasing in quantity or severity on a timescale consistent with anthropogenic warming.
OP said that specific storms are climate induced - there is no way of saying that a storm formed due to climate change when it would not have formed in the absence.
They said a multi year batch of storms was climate change induced. That's significantly more valid than saying a specific normal-size storm is. The dice even out as you add more samples.
I don't want to look for papers right now. Ask them about the claim that "This has been a well-publicized problem there since at least the 1990's", not me.
My point is that you definitely can prove (or disprove) it. Your claim that it's unprovable on purpose or something is not right.
Can they bury power lines in houston? I thought the water table was pretty close to the surface.
(if you want a swimming pool, dig a hole!)
EDIT: ok I looked
it seems there are two kinds of lines - transmission lines and distribution lines.
Distribution lines can be buried, but it might not be good in hurricane prone areas that are prone to flooding.
transmission lines are hard/expensive to bury, since the insulation requirements are technically challenging.
The hurricane seems to have taken out some large transmission lines in addition to distribution lines.
I wonder if maybe redundant lines might be cheaper than buried lines?
Failed buried transmission wires caused the famous five week blackout of Auckland NZ in 1998 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Auckland_power_crisis
It's almost as if you put public infrastructure under the control of people who only care about collecting short term rents bad things happen.
Other comment California has underground transmission lines. And yes sometimes they fail. Had a smaller one oops in my old neighborhood in San Francisco a few years ago.
PG&E is spending about $20b to underground 10,000 miles of lines in fire prone areas. Seems like a lot but it's $40/foot. Still that's only 10% of the total.
https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering...
What the Bay Area has seen is nothing like actual hurricanes.
In terms of wind speed, quite similar. A category 1 hurricane is only 74-95mph winds. This is pretty mild, as far as storms go. I've been through many, many category 1 hurricanes and it's not much of a storm. Things only start getting scary around category 3.
I have several friends who live high in the hills in the Santa Cruz mountains and they regularly see wind speeds in the range of cat 1 hurricanes.
You have experience with something you think is similar but you don't have enough experience to understand the nuances.
It's ok for you to sit this one out.
The CEO of Centerpoint was the CFO of PG&E and the CFO of Centerpoint came from PG&E as well. So you're more right than you know!
Also live in SF Bay Area, but my sister lived in Houston for ~20 years and I grew up in the Northeast (and got hit by hurricanes Gloria and Bob as a child).
What we saw with the winter storms of 2022 and 2023 was nothing close to what Houston or even the NY area gets with a hurricane. Bay Area topography is hilly; most of the wind is broken by the Santa Cruz mountains. I'm in one of the SF Peninsula canyons that's known for being particularly windy, and we saw maybe 70mph gusts and 30mph sustained. A Cat 1 hurricane (like Beryl, Bob, or Gloria) has 75mph winds sustained with gusts up to 100mph. A Cat 5 (like Katrina at the height of its strength; it made landfall as a cat 3) has 150mph sustained winds and 200+mph gusts.
Hurricane Bob knocked out power to eastern Long Island NY for 2 days in 1991. Hurricane Sandy (also a Cat 1 at landfall, but a direct hit on NYC) knocked out power for 2 weeks. The problem is not unique to Houston or Texas. PG&E has plenty of its own problems, but the reason fewer poles went down our winter storms (and they still did go down; Cupertino was without power for almost 2 days) was simply because the wind was less.
Tell me your uninformed, without telling me.
In other words, politics scales the other way: The more people you have in the same spot using the same resource, the more different ways they can be unhappy with the management of that resource.
"no easy fix, preparation, or practically anything else that can be done to prevent something like this"
Regulations on the initial construction? In other words, plan ahead.
But no, I must have my 'Freeeeedooooommmmm'.
You can't force me to prepare.
Why didn’t we think to regulate physics before!?
Does physics dictate how you build power lines? Where is physics the constraint on more hardened construction? Physics isn't saying, build above ground and 'low cost'.
Bro.
Come up with a plan and a budget for your buried cables and sell it to the people of Texas who will have to pay for it.
They are paying for it. It's either on the front end with regulations on more expensive construction, or on the back end with power outages, damage and repairs.
Put that in your presentation to the Texans!
Closer to regulating that providers of essential infrastructure acknowledge that physics exists.
Yeah, well what about existing infrastructure? Most new construction already buries the last mile of power.
But if you do have above ground power lines feeding your house, how likely would it be that you'd be in favor of having your entire backyard dug up for a couple weeks while they implemented this huge public works project? How likely would you be willing to shoulder the cost burden? And of course, it's just as simple as digging a trench and burying the lines, right? I'm pretty sure there isn't any buried oil and gas infrastructure in the Houston area.... right?
I would love it, personally. In addition to being vulnerable to wind and tree damage, above-ground power lines are very unsightly. Just compare any neighborhood with underground power to the ones where you can't look out of any window without seeing ugly poles and wires everywhere.
Sure, just stop complaining about not having power.
Seems like everyone is ready to argue about how impossible everything is. Shrugs "guess it's impossible, we just have to go on like we've always have".
I don't think the difference between the power grid and the power utility is clear to most people. The grid is a statewide wholesale electricity distribution network which consists of generators, substations and high voltage long distance transmission lines. The utility is in charge of taking the power from the grid and delivering 110/220V to end customers, i.e. homes and businesses. This hurricane caused a lot of damage to the utility infrastructure. The grid performed fine.
Some people bring up the storm Ian in 2021. Winter storms are fundamentally different disasters. Cold snaps drive up local electricity demand sharply and this is the kind of thing that can stress the grid.
Sorry to be pedantic, but most US businesses have 208/120V or 480/277V three-phase electrical services. There are some old existing 240/120V three-phase high-leg delta (aka bastard leg) delta services. [0] Delta-wye transformers are the most common type today, that’s where you get the 208/120 and 480/277 services from. [1]
Larger commercial/industrial customers can have their own medium/high voltage substations and premises wiring/distribution.
Medium voltage is 2.4kV to 70kV with 4160V and 13800V being the most common for commercial/industrial applications. High voltage is roughly 100kV to 1mV.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-leg_delta
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-wye_transformer
Sorry to be pedantic, but define “business”. As someone who’s worked on many job sites doing commercial electrical work, it’s not as common as you imply that there’s three phase service running to a business. Do a lot have it, yes, most, no. Literally everything else you said I’m aligned with.
Basically just factories yah? And like large hotels. Your random strip mall business is very happy with a standard 200 amp 240V service.
It's more than just factories and large hotels by far, but still not "most" businesses (which implies greater than 50%).
I sell and run commercial electrical work and I can think of maybe a handful of places I’ve sent electricians that have a single phase service. I live in a large metro area of 4M people, virtually every commercial building over 4-5k sq ft has a three-phase service where I live. Banks, fast food restaurants, gas stations, etc.
What sorts of commercial projects have you worked on that don’t have three phase electrical that are located on commercial or industrial zoned property? Virtually every single multitenant office or light commercial building I’ve ever been in has three-phase.
I guess you could count Jeff’s welding shop in his pole building on his residential property a business, but it’s not commercially zoned property.
I’m skeptical about your claim, I’d wager that more commercial/industrial zoned properties have three-phase than not, based on what I’ve seen across hundreds of customers.
Then again, there’s a lot of small business commercial stuff I ignore because I’m at a union shop and we can’t compete with a one man electrical van when it comes to wiring up a 1500 sq ft nail salon or whatever, there’s no money in that market anyways.
Why apologize. You're in the right place for pedantry ;)
In Houston the problems appear to be due to deregulation of the previous HL&P monopoly. If you saw it happen, it was a slow-motion dumpster fire.
I could say a lot more about that later, but the dereg process took so long and was so transparent about what was going to happen (over the course of multiple terms of elected officials and lobbyists), that the split-up into separate corporations was completely gamed before it ever went into effect.
In hindsight you would have to say that the entire purpose of deregulation here was to make it possible to extract more wealth from the same assets and ratepayers than it ever would have been legal before.
Carla was a disaster in the 1960's and by the late '70's the monopoly was still trimming trees and hauling away megatons of branches like nobody has ever seen in recent years. Protecting one of their most valuable assets, the distribution lines themselves. The Texas Public Utility Commission functionally required the power companies to work in favor of the citizens in a way that was completely lost after dereg.
That's when the lines were spun off into a corporation known as Centerpoint, virtually gifted assets to them from the public good, for them to operate as a post-monopoly middleman.
The generator companies and wholesalers are upstream, and the retailers are who ratepayers interact with so it's not designed to be only one middleman. Even though there's now "competition" that did not exist previously.
Centerpoint just transmits the power, so the ratepayer and generator regulations don't apply to the corporation that owns the transmission assets since dereg.
Centerpoint says Beryl is the worst storm they have endured, well Alicia was a direct hit but that was before Centerpoint existed. Yes the bulk of the assets were in lots better shape back then, they were regulated like a single-point-of-failure common-good monopoly should be.
Ida in New Orleans was a real mess and exposed a lot of issues in the city besides electricity.
Because power was out for so long, everyone threw out a ton of food, but there was no trash pickup in some cases for weeks because of staffing shortages and contract disputes, so there was stinky trash and huge swarms of bright blue flies everywhere. At one point, the mayor suggested people could drive their own trash to the transfer station—after it had been sitting out in 95 degree heat for weeks.
There also was no proper street cleaning, which meant streets and sidewalks were full of storm debris, including things like roofing nails. The lines at tire repair shops were wrapping around the block.
Entergy's meter reading and billing also got completely thrown off. I moved shortly after Ida, and it took months to get any bill at all in the new place, and I only got my final bill for the old place this year, almost three years later, no longer living in Louisiana. (They also never actually sent me the bill or turned on my autopay, so I only knew it was time to pay when the power went out).
I am from central Louisiana (although I mostly have lived outside the state) and have been considering moving to NOLA and this is the kind of thing that gives me pause. Thanks for sharing.
Not to be pedantic, but this is easy to fix. Burying power lines, trimming trees, and all of the other labor are solved problems. By and large, it's not even a particularly hard technical problem. It's a bunch of easy solutions that are expensive and tedious and politically unpopular (nobody wants to spend money or tell their constituents that roads will be closed for utility work).
I'd also note that Hurricane Sandy was category 2 when it hit NYC, which is inarguably far denser than Houston. New York had power back for 95% of customers in 11 days. New Jersey did the same in less than two weeks. Texas could be doing better.
The water table in Houston is less than a foot below ground, making line burial impossible, and with almost 7 million residents, economically infeasible. Trees are not the problem since Houston has few trees.
Like most underprovisioned (and under-designed) metro areas, Houston's only solution is to modularize its neighborhoods into independent services that can quickly switch to alternative sources of power, thereby rerouting around damage while it's being repaired. The absolutely worst model is the one they have now -- to remove all ability to route demand dynamically through as many external partners as possible, thereby minimizing their vulnerability to single points of catastropic failure. This needs to extend not only to out-of-state power sources but also to in-state and in-city multipoint forms of routing and even power generation.
Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. THAT's what's needed most. And the cooperative spirit to do what's necessary -- something Texas lacks in SPADES.
This is quite literally the easiest thing to fix.
Why doesn’t Tokyo, which almost entirely relies on above ground power cables and gets hit with strong typhoons every year, not experience these problems? What makes the Houston situation so hopeless?
I think there is also a tree maintenance issue, the same problem that lead to fires in California. I'm 2 blocks from where one of the tornados touched down during the derecho and close the transmission lines that were heavily damaged. We were without power for 5 days after the derecho and only 1 day this time. If you look at where power was least impacted and restored the soonest for Beryl it is the same area that was most impacted by the derecho.
I think the derecho took out a lot of the problematic trees and branches.
Florida took a direct hit from a cat 5 in 2017 and power was back in most places in a couple of days, and iirc they didn't lose a single (new) pole statewide. After Wilma they hardened the infrastructure and this isn't as big a problem there, despite having even worse geographic issues than Texas and New Orleans.
This last mile - lines/etc - are also partly what make trivial matters like 'extended cold periods' a problem. I hate it here in TX
In the past they've never had a cat 5. The last cat 5 was Carla in 1961. The last cat 3 was Alicia in 1983. The last cat 2 was Alicia in 2008 (although that was actually east of Houston and just hit Houston with its weaker winds).
Climate change should make such storms more likely to form, but it should also change ocean and air current patterns which could affect the chances they make it to Houston.
The list I got those from noted that in 1961 air conditioning was still novel, which makes me curious. How did people deal with the heat in Houston before air conditioning?
The average July temperature in Houston nowadays is 4.2℉ (2.3℃) higher than it was in 1970, and climate change tends to cause more extremes, so I'd guess that the highs are also higher and extreme days more common, so maybe AC has become more of a necessity nowadays?
I'd expect the population of Houston in those days was also a little more self selective, in that of you couldn't deal with that heat, you probably didn't want to live there anyways.
There's a reason a lot of southwestern cities like Phoenix started booming in population when AC became more readily available.
Probably right, but also you don't miss what you've never had. Not having air conditioning was just normal.
It might have been normal but people are people and would still seek out more comfortable climates. And if you stretch the definition of air conditioning a bit, we've had that for about as long as we've been living in semi enclosed spaces. Running a fire at night to keep the cave warm is air conditioning. Building your home to have water flowing under the floors so that you can cool or heat the floors passively (I believe the Romans were doing this) is air conditioning. Hanging a wet towel to allow the water to evaporate and cool the room a little is air conditioning.
Before the 20th century people seeked out arable land that could feed them reliably, any comfort the climate provided was a very distant concern.
Arable land and climates comfortable for people tended to have a very large overlap until the the invention of modern irrigation techniques like center-pivot irrigation. Before that, you need pretty special conditions to be able to successfully farm in many of the places in discussion.
Arable land that isn't habitable for weeks or months out of the year wasn't terribly valuable or sought out.
I imagine at first it was really drafty homes, and later on big ceiling fans everywhere
If I remember correctly, Houston is one of the most Air Conditioned cites on earth. In the older days, Houston was much smaller with less concrete and paving that holds the heat in, making the entire area warmer. Plus, older houses were designed for the climate that they were in. Now, every place in the US basically gets the same house design regardless of the climate.
There were a lot of behavioral adaptations that don't seem as practical now because the extremes are so much hotter and more frequent. Porch sitting, the siesta, outdoor sleeping on porches and roofs, etc. were all ways to mitigate the heat.
Wealthier people built big houses with lots of thermal mass and tall ceilings while poorer people lived in shotgun houses with aligned doors and porches that created constant airflow.
Why start at 1970 when Houston has a temperature record back to 1889? Start in the 60s and the jump is far lower. Or any other year and the difference changes.
It's obvious that everyone wants to blame it on their favorite villain, whatever that is.
A more rational approach would be to look at comparable cities and see how they cope with big storms, whatever the storms' cat numbers. My guess is, no matter what comparables you pick, Houston comes out on the bottom.
Maybe it IS deregulation! You can be in favor of it in general, and still admit, "OK, maybe in this instance it didn't work." That doesn't mean you're giving free rein to the people in favor of the government regulating everything.
The issue was exactly the same with Ida and New Orleans in 2021. Areas of the New Orleans metro area were without power for 3 weeks or more
so that's one comparable. Surely there are other First World cities that have storms?
Look to Asia, all the major coastal and island cities have far bigger storms than whatever Houston experiences, many times a year, and they pretty much all fare better than this.
Someone (maybe in Houston!) should compile a list of all those cities, the storms they've had, and the number of power outage days they suffered. Not a cherry-picked list of "good" cities; ALL of them.
That would be a lot of research, for sure.
Sprawling cities with millions of people that experience Gulf hurricanes?
Miami, which also experiences massive power outages when they're hit with even category 1 hurricanes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
Houston is a low-lying coastal city surrounded by rivers and bayous whose population has increased 10x since 1950. Not really an ideal situation to build out that kind of housing for millions of people in floodplains.
I live in an area northwest of Houston.
We had similar outages (though not as long) in May (serious storm, but not a hurricane)
In many cases, it's the result of winds knocking trees into powerlines. I feel like preventative maintenance could mitigate this. A big factor is likely our deregulation: the electricity provider isn't the company billing end customers.
I live in Seattle’s Ballard area, but work with people on the east side. Big storms blow down branches all the time on the other side of the lake, causing power outages. We have less trees here in Seattle, comparatively, or maybe Seattle power and light is better at tree maintenance, but ya lots of trees = lots of power outages from what I can infer.
Some richer communities on the east side bury their lines so power outages are more rare.
Downtown Ballard had a lot of power outages over the last two years. Apparently they were using a different transformer than everywhere else, all of which are getting old, and some procurement mistake lead to the spare parts being back-ordered by a year.
(This is second hand through a neighbor who actually went and bothered them about all the outages, so there are probably mistakes.)
Using different equipment from the rest of Seattle is very Ballard.
Ya, I live on 60th, so 4 blocks north of market, and it’s weird that they get power outages to about 56th or 57th while we never do.
The delivery price is regulated like it was pre-deregulatuon and is a separate line item in pretty much everyone's bill.
I see people talking about deficiencies in the Texas grid, and that may be true but hardly seems relevant to Houston; it's the Houston grid that seems to be acutely problematic. In fact, it occurred to me that with much of Houston still offline, the TX grid is probably less stressed than usual and a look at the dashboards on ercot.com would seem to confirm this - capacity is well over demand.
it's totally irrelevant. there was a wind storm in a region where burying power lines is impractical
without wireless power transmission I'm not sure what people want.
Where do you put lines that can't be buried or blown over?
SimCity and Elon Musk to the rescue! See, we put satellites in space with giant solar panels on then and then just beam the energy down from space, directly to a receiver dish mounted on your rooftop, next to the starlink dish.
The state grid is problematic at other times, but in the case of storms, it's irrelevant when a fallen tree takes out a physical power line. It's more of a "last mile" issue.
The solution to last-mile problems is fewer miles. Fact is metro Houston takes up 15x more land than is really called for. A factor of 15 makes a significant difference in the cost of wires, pipes, and roads.
It's likely a combination of multiple factors. Texas, being a red state, most certainly has a stronger climate denial sentiment, which is going to affect policies and regulations. Texas may be unprepared because major hurricanes were uncommon in the past. Global warming means hotter temperatures which makes long power outages more unbearable. And probably other reasons I can't think of.
I expect things will improve, but it may take some years. As these events become more common and people have to suffer every year, voters are going to get fed up, and Republicans would be foolish to keep up their climate denial stance.
Maybe, but no. Texas has its history of major hurricanes. While maybe not as popular of a target as Florida and New Orleans, but Houston definitely has as much of a bullseye on it as a trailer park in a tornado.
Harvey was predicted well in advance that it was going to be a devastating storm. For days ahead I saw the up to 40" of rain and thought that couldn't possibly be correct. Then it happened. Houston took little action and then acted shocked. Of course, Houston has it's own unique set of problems with their lack of zoning rules plus so many other things without having to make some climate denier argument that's not necessarily wrong but just horribly out of place
I just know what I hear. Power outage during freezing temperatures in winter time, and their response? No handouts, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. As if people in a major metropolitan city can just go into the nearby woods and gather firewood.
Politics is definitely a factor.
It's also election year. The state agencies didn't submit the emergency declaration work before the storm hit like they usually did in years past - this is not their first rodeo, so it can't be explained by ignorance.
Also, Houston is Harris county, so not exactly the governor's or legislature's favorite voting county.
Centerpoint applied for $100 mil in funding from the department of energy in 2023 to make their lines more resilient to wind and storms and were turned down.
It's not nearly as clear cut as "red = head in sand"
Hurricane Ike was a category 4 that traveled nearly directly over Houston in 2008. (It wasn't a category four when it passed over, since, like all major storms, they weaken as they move inland.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ike
Burying lines, especially in historic areas, is incredibly expensive and not necessarily a panacea either, although it helps. Is it worth it?
Realistically, for the millions upon millions of people that live in the greater Houston MSA (and of course except for those who rely on power for healthcare equipment, who really need to invest in a small generator or get to a shelter), it's far more cost effective to simply deal with power outages every decade or two.
During Ike, large parts of Houston, especially to the northeast, were literally underwater, so power wouldn't have helped anyway. The number of utility crews lined up along highways from other states, even from thousands of miles away, in the immediate aftermath of Ike is both inspiring and enlightening, especially when you recognize that they were going into a disaster zone, likely without a nice hotel to go back to or even running water after working a 12 hour shift.
So, no, it's just part of living near the coast in a hurricane-prone area. If you don't like it, move somewhere else.
I think part of the argument is that it’s like that the number of these events will double or trouble, or even become yearly with climate change.
Yes, that's the argument. Of course, some of it remains to be seen, because as of now we're not actually seeing more or more intense storms compared to historical averages (at least that we know about).
Houston has, on average, one large storm event every decade or so, and that hasn't really changed much over the last 100 years. https://www.weather.gov/hgx/major_events
We’re probably about to see more and more intense storms over the Atlantic. Hurricane Beryl is the earliest category five Atlantic hurricane in records going back around 100 years ([source](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9r3g572lrno)).
So it’s just a matter of time.
Also, looking at your source, I see 2 tropical cyclones between 1900-1950, 3 between 1950-2000, and then 8 in the 24 years since. To me that looks like an increase in tropical cyclones over time.
(Not an expert, but try to follow climate science as part of $Dayjob. It’s always hard to write quick summaries in Earth Science, because the system is very complex.)
We have to be careful about what is meant by “these events”.
According to the sources I was able to find [1,2], sea level rise (SLR) is perhaps the dominant driver for the increasing damages from tropical cyclones (TCs). Models show some increase (I’m not finding any support for 2x or 3x though!) in the number of high-intensity TCs, and TC intensification is expected to be more rapid.
But the underlying SLR will make even smaller TCs more consequential - even if the number of storms of a given intensity does not change.
[1] specifically says this. And if you look at the consensus report [2], they spend most of their time discussing SLR, in effect as an amplifier for all the trouble a TC can cause. Only in one sentence in a very long discussion do they claim that TCs are themselves worsening, and the statement is quite nuanced:
“For example, hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly and decaying more slowly, leading to stronger storms extending farther inland with heavier rainfall and higher storm surges…”
So if you interpret “these events” as “high dollar damage TCs”, you are correct. But not in the raw number of TCs of a given intensity.
And you are right that the situation is quite dire already:
“Annual frequencies of both minor and moderate coastal flooding increased by a factor of 2–3 along most Atlantic and Gulf coastlines between 1990 and 2020” [2]
The same source says models predict a 5-10x increase in flood events by 2100, which is truly staggering. The recommendation of the GP commenter (“If you don't like it, move somewhere else”) seems to be poorly informed about how important adaptation will be.
[1] https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/a-force-of-nat...
[2] https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/chapter/9/, and expand out “key message 1”.
its funny people comment and act like they know how strong a hurricane and how much damage it should do like theyre all the same. or that they know how much infrastructure is supposed to break or not break.
if you were there during beryl you know the winds were strong enough to take trees out yes? trust me houston is not a stranger to hurricanes we all went through a cat 4 harvey years back. which well funnily enough didnt have any huge power problems. more so a house and car totally flooded problem. or 10in of water in the house for weeks problem. mold problem.
tropical storm ike before that took out power for weeks causing $30b in damages in the states
wish people would put their energy into helping or something instead of just thinking about their own agenda. or talking crap i dont know i wouldnt wish this on anyone its hell
I’ve lived through a lot of big hurricanes. Cat 1 storms can be worse than more intense storms, as they are often slower-moving, so they can dump a LOT more water per square inch. Not sure if that was the case here, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’d fare significantly worse under higher category storms.
_just_. The definition of "just a cat 1" is winds from 75 to 95 miles per hour. There is some debate over whether it picked up to cat 2 levels just before it made landfall and reweakened to cat 1.
Political corruption preventing elected officials from actually enforcing any laws or authority over Centerpoint.