Texas has seen no help from fema or red cross. Not one fucking ounce of help. We are Freezing, We have No Water, No Power, No Internet. Grocery Stores are empty, cant find anything.
Now This Story Comes Out On Our Local Fake News.... https://abc13.com/weather/fema-sending-60-generators-to-texas-amid-power-outages-/10349070/... But if you read story it seems like they are more worried about vaccine spots. This is now going on 5 days and they are talking of sending food and water and supplies and Generators... Wtf where the hell has all this shit been... Still Have Not Seen Anything.
I design buildings. The differences in the building codes between Texas climate zones and ND climate zones are huge as far as insulation requirements are concerned. Nothing here is designed to be in this cold of weather for this long. It is all failing. Water utilities need parts to fix pumps that froze, but can't get any because truck aren't running again yet, because the roads are a mess and we don't have plows and salt trucks. Same for grocery stores, no food because no trucks. I lived in Minnesota for a while and the opposite is true there. The worst week I was there, the temps were -20 with wind chill -40. It was cold, but those buildings are designed to withstand it. They don't do well in heat above 90 though, as a lot of homes don't even have A/C, just heat. It's not about our "weak side", you have to consider the actual physical differences of the regions. I'd be curious to see how well you fare after a week of 100+ temps with 95% humidity. It's like living in a sauna.
I'm pretty sure a beaten down Trailer that's older than my mom isn't exactly building standards.
Well you got that right! Those are even less equipped to deal with cold weather, and there's probably millions of them here.
And you mean 100+ Temps with Air Condition at every building?? I was in Garland Texas working on HVAC on roofs there. Well, it was a school I was going to.
I don't like HVAC but there are ways to deal with heat. Just like there are ways to deal with cold.
No one is better than the other, you're not out there every day in direct sunlight like I'm not outside in direct ice cold weather, because if I was, I'd be dead with frostbite in 10 minutes.
You're right, one area isn't better or worse, just different. And yes, there are ways to deal with cold... we just don't have many of them here. I am knowledgeable enough to understand the differences and had my house well prepared, but I'm without running water because the 8" main feeding my area froze and ruptured (I do have plenty of stored water for drinking/bathing, and we collected snow to melt for flushing the toilets). On top of that, everybody dripping their faucets to keep their home's pipes from freezing has actually lowered the storage tanks in my area below a certain level, which automatically shut down the pumps to keep them from burning up, which caused them to freeze instead. The system was never designed to provide for this much demand all at once. It's a clusterfuck of conditions our infrastructure just wasn't built to handle. Hopefully things will get better after temps start staying above freezing on Saturday. Granted, there are plenty of people who had no idea what we were in for, so I've been making the rounds making sure all my neighbors are taken care of, delivering cases of water to folks weren't prepared.
I didn't have any issues with water because I keep a week's worth of bottled water on hand and if necessary I can always break into the unopened jugs of distilled water I use for making soap. Power's back so I'm boiling tap water for cleaning with and drinking the bottled water. Heating was the big problem. A lot of people (self included) live in apartments without fireplaces, so there is simply no heat source without electricity. Can't use generators indoors. If I lived in a colder climate I'd make sure I at least had a fireplace and firewood and that's just gone on my list of must-haves for my next apartment.
I wouldn't drip the faucet, that will freeze it faster. Usually you can thaw the faucet cold off if the main pipe isn't frozen, usually isn't as underground. You need to go to your water heater and then put a heater (if you had Electricity that is) pointing at the cold line.
I will say, the Gov not sending help is annoying the fuck outta me. And whoever made the decision not to deserves to be hung.
My pipes are fine. I turned my water off at the meter and drained the lines at every fixture. The water heater is in an interior space with no danger of freezing since we never lost power for longer than an hour a couple times. The problem here is with the utility supply lines. They are not buried very deep and are often exposed directly to the weather (creek crossings and such), and pretty much never insulated. I'm hearing news of different neighborhoods coming back online, so we should be fine in a matter of days.