Yeah, there's going to be hell to pay about the Dallas hospitals. Meanwhile, they did manage to keep power on at the football stadium for some big event there tomorrow.

There was 1/4" coating of ice across Houston this morning which led to many high-speed cases of bumper cars. They closed my workplace until Monday so I'm safe and sound at home.

-Blast

Southern Arizona also got screwed with thousands of homes without natural gas. Best guess is Monday or Tuesday before they can get them going again, lots of frozen pipes. I expect the lawyers will have a field day.

That's interesting. I forget the technical term, but I thought I read somewhere that the pumps used for high pressure natural gas pipelines often used natural gas and don't require grid power to operate. Guess that wasn't the case there.

Where I live, El Paso Electric lost 90% of its generating capacity during the cold snap. It dropped all the way down to 1 F here. Plant cooling systems froze solid and critical sensors stopped working. News footage showed large pipes and valve pedestals split like they were cloven with axes. Apparently, the city is now importing most of it's power from Palo Verde (In Arizona) which El Paso Electric owns a piece of.

We also had rolling black outs. Occasionally, the switching gear essentially froze in the off position and some areas were without power for more than the planned 45 minutes. Resultantly, pipes froze and houses flooded.

I escaped essentially unscathed. Only an irrigation anti-siphon value failed (I should have drained it but never have needed to before). Others in my office lost all water or had pipes break. One had his furnace fail. I feel very lucky.

The worst part, my new backpack shipment was delayed, nothing like getting home expecting new gear to find out it was delayed by a storm

Long story, but here goes:

Cowboy's Stadium is fed from 4 different grid sections, coming in from 4 different directions. These feeds were purpose built new from long distances. This was done to prevent an accidental power outage during an event. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if 104,000 + folks found themselves in the dark unexpectedly? Not a pretty thought. These four differing feeds make it inherently difficult to drop the power to Jerry World, BUT. . . .

The four feeds had nothing to do with the power staying on in the UFO. Three things kept the power on:
1) Atlanta
2) NFL
3) DHS

Atlanta:
In 2000, the Super Bowl was in Atlanta, GA. Atlanta had an ice storm, and was less than prepared. The NFL has since eliminated Atlanta from consideration when NFL host cities are discussed.

NFL:
The NFL has become something bigger than it should be. They basically sent a message, "Power NEVER GOES OUT IN AN NFL SUPER BOWL ARENA UNLESS POWER GOES OUT EVERYWHERE FIRST!"

And the REAL REASON?

DHS:
The Department of Homeland Security called ERCOT (Electrical Reliability Council of Texas), and advised them that continuity of electrical service was a matter of national security, and that any controlled reduction/elimination of service would be handled by federal law enforcement as such. Discretion being the better part of valor, and the fine folks at ERCOT not being interested in free room and board at the slant bar motel, the power to Jerry World did not go off.......

Now to the Hospitals:

Parkland is an absolute ALBATROSS!

It was originally built as a small hospital, in a smaller sized, large town. It has since continually grown, one step at a time, without one thought to what came before and what will come after. I have had more experience with Parkland’s telecom infrastructure than I ever cared to have, and I still don’t get it. Parkland has triple redundancy for both copper, and fiber telecom from the local exchange carrier. This has to do with it being a major Civil Defense (now DHS) hospital and command center. All the telecom links come from different telco central offices, and from different directions, making it harder to kill all communications to the facility. One minor detail:

THEY ALL ENTER THE BUILDING FROM A SINGLE MANHOLE, INTO A SINGLE BASEMENT, AND INTO A SINGLE IT ROOM.

I sure hope the expected problem that all of the redundancy was planned to prevent, does not happen in one of the choke points where all the redundancies come together.

Since the folks that planned Parkland’s telecom infrastructure throughout history, also planned the electricity, I am sure there are multiple paths to multiple sub-stations to protect Parkland power. Of course all of those sub-stations are probably fed from one power generating station. When it takes its break, then so does Parkland.

My only question?

Why is Parkland not upset with itself? After all, don’t they have emergency generators as required by common sense and probably LAW?

After WWII, we moved to Dallas where my Dad was on the faculty of Southwestern Medical School, adjacent to Parkland, their teaching hospital.

I have memories of a genteel brick building that was then the hospital - is that structure still in use?

Yep, it is still there, attached to all the other buildings that are now "Parkland". As I understand it, there is going to be a new "Parkland" built, and the old one will also be a part of the overall PARKLAND.

One must remember Parkland is attached to all of the other hospitals, and if you are not a veteran of the Hospital District, you better have a guide. The map is useless.

Even Rube Goldberg would be confused. . . . . .

Looks like El Paso is having trouble with all this unusual sub-freezing weather. Their water distribution system seems to have "sprung a leak," literally. It sounds like residents have been asked to only use water for drinking, and also issued a boil order.

Supposedly, our 'Boil Water' order will end tomorrow and reservoir levels are back to normal levels. It struck me and others here as a half-hearted order since water officials continuously said the water was OK but boil it just in case. I drank a lot of bottled water which I already had on hand but otherwise, it wasn't much of an inconvenience.

Embarrassingly and because the water emergency happened after all the cold weather had passed and on a weekend, I didn't even know about it until an out-of-state relative called to ask me about it. The last news story I had seen after the storm had passed said that the water system was fine and the water was fine unless your immediate area had a service interruption -- in which case you should boil your water.

The upside was that with all the schools and government offices closed because of the water and power shortages, traffic to work was very light.