How freezing rain, tree-lined neighborhoods and above-ground power lines prolonged Austin power outages

Much of Texas’ infrastructure was not built to sustain such extreme cold weather. And local governments historically have not prepared for winter weather — in large part due to the costs. Experts said cities and states across the U.S. must rethink their winter weather preparedness. That can include burying power lines, redeploying emergency response units and keeping trees trimmed,

“When we talk about adaptation, when we talk about resilience, what it means is that day to day, it costs more money to do that,” said Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “Now, it saves it in the long run. It saves it both in terms of economic loss as well as lives and livelihoods. But that [cost] is unavoidable.”

The 2023 outages differed from Winter Storm Uri. During that 2021 storm, the state’s electric grid nearly collapsed due to imbalances in electricity demand and power supply amid subfreezing temperatures across a large swath of the state. Still, the weather in 2023 ultimately caused major disruptions and closures.

“One thing Uri showed us is how vulnerable we are to any weather event that’s even a little bit outside of our normal operating conditions,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist and the director for the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University. “Just a few degrees outside of that, and things go to hell very quickly.”