On Feb. 12, the Friday before harsh winter weather cut off power and water to millions of Texans, killed dozens of people and caused billions of dollars in damage, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo advised residents to prepare as if a Category 5 hurricane were on the way.
“I just want to make sure that everybody knows that if the models are right, we’re about to see an incident the likes of which we have not seen in 30 years — a very high probability of power outages, dangerous conditions outside, road closures. The same type of thing we would see in a Category 5 hurricane,” Hidalgo said at a press conference.
Her critics were quick to paint the comparison as hyperbolic.
“Typical scare tactics,” one person wrote on Twitter. “Yeah, we get it. It’s gunna snow and ice... NO WHERE NEAR A CAT 5 HURRICANE!”
“Why not just compare it to a nuclear bomb being dropped on us?” read another reply to Hidalgo. “Yes, this is serious, but stop it.”
The toll of last week’s winter storm still is coming into focus, but it already has become clear the damage rivals that of a major hurricane. Roughly 1.4 million customers lost power in the Houston metro area. Nearly 80 people across Texas died from hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning and other storm-related causes, according to an Associated Press tally as of Monday. Grocery stores, facing food shortages, imposed limits on certain items including eggs, milk and bread even days after power was restored. And a water crisis unfolded as nearly the entire Houston area — and more than 14 million people across the state — were ordered to boil their water before drinking it, even as many lacked running water or the electricity to operate their stoves.
Hannah Siqueiros, clears insulation from a damaged ceiling after a broken pipe was repaired pipe above the kitchen in Michelle Toy's home Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021 in Spring. Water from a damaged pipe above the kitchen caused the ceiling to collapse.
Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographerIt is too early to tell if the winter freeze will prove costlier statewide than Hurricane Harvey, which inflicted $125 billion in damage concentrated in Southeast Texas. What is evident is that both storms left behind widespread property damage: County and city officials estimate that tens of thousands of Houston-area residents have burst water pipes or other damage from last week’s weather.
“You think about the wind from a hurricane blowing a tree into your house,” said Jim Blackburn, co-director of Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters Center. “That’s nothing different than a pipe bursting in your attic and the entire roof collapsing in on you.”
Still, even Houston’s most destructive storms never made landfall as Category 5 hurricanes, the highest rating on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Hurricanes Ike and Harvey both peaked at Category 4; Hurricane Rita reached Category 5 status but came ashore as a Category 3.
The conditions that define a Category 5 storm — namely sustained winds of at least 157 miles per hour — would destroy most homes in its path and make most of the area uninhabitable for weeks or months, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Effective message
Eric Berger, a meteorologist who runs the Space City Weather blog, said the winter freeze known as Winter Storm Uri inflicted damage similar to major hurricanes, roughly in line with a Category 3 or 4 storm.
“To be clear, we really don’t have any concept of what a Category 5 hurricane striking the Houston area would look like,” Berger said. “That would be widespread destruction in the sense of completely destroying homes, blowing them right off their foundations. A catastrophic, historic event.”
Hidalgo’s comparison still was effective, Berger said, because it made an impression on residents who otherwise may not have viewed the coming storm as much of a threat.
“The messaging was bang on, because I think comparing this event to a hurricane was a good way to capture people’s attention,” Berger said. “I think a lot of people have a warm and fuzzy feeling about a winter storm in Houston. … This was really a different event.”
Hidalgo said she was searching for language that would resonate with Harris County residents who have grown uncomfortably familiar with tropical storms but had never encountered such brutal winter weather. On the day she made the comparison, meteorologists already were predicting temperatures would reach their lowest point since the 1980s.
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“My sense was the experts and the meteorologists said this was going to be bad, and they had the evidence to prove it. And it was a disservice in my mind for me to sugarcoat it,” Hidalgo said. “I was trying to use something that our community could understand, and that would break through with our community. That’s how we picked the hurricane metaphor.”
Meteorologists, including Jeff Lindner, the director of flood operations at the Harris County Flood Control District, were telling Hidalgo temperatures would reach historic lows. She and other county officials expected freezing rain would cause power outages, and they anticipated the food shortages, in part because icy conditions likely would make roads impassable for days. And just like during tropical storms, people might need temporary shelter, Hidalgo thought, after their homes flooded from busted pipes.
“My job is not to scare people. That’s not at all what I’m going for. My job is to clearly communicate what people should expect,” Hidalgo said. “Yeah, there’s a nonzero chance I may be wrong, but that’s not worth people not being prepared.”
Familiar trauma
Houstonians may have been unaccustomed to the frigid conditions, but the trauma was deeply familiar to an area that has been battered in recent years by chemical fires, tropical depressions, hurricanes and the coronavirus pandemic. The region saw six major chemical fires between March 2019 and January 2020, leading to massive pollutant exposure, worker injuries and destruction of homes. Storms have inundated the area, damaging homes that were still awaiting repairs from the previous disaster.
Shonza Branch, 56, remained without running water Thursday due to pipe damage at her home in northeast Houston. Her house still bears the scars of Harvey: mold on the bathroom wall, broken window panes, poor insulation from ceiling damage that has yet to be fully fixed.
Last week, Branch — who takes more than 20 medications for various ailments — wore her winter coat and boots to bed as she slept under four blankets, trying to keep warm as cold air filtered into the house. The storm was in some ways worse than Harvey, Branch said, noting she did not lose running water and had only brief power outages during the hurricane.
The blackouts last week were especially rough on Branch because she was unable to use her sleep apnea machine, and she had no way to refrigerate the insulin she takes to treat her diabetes.
“This has been a crazy few years for me,” Branch said. “It’s totally devastating. Sometimes I just sit here and I think about all this stuff that’s happening. It’s been terrible, I’m just going to be honest.”
A worker at Tomball ISD brooms the floors Thursday after a sprinkler system issue drenched much of the campus amid frigid temperatures this week.
Melissa Phillip, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographerScott Tinker, the state geologist for Texas and a professor of geoscience at the University of Texas at Austin, said the winter storm was similar to the consequences of a hurricane in the damage it did to infrastructure systems.
“I think in many ways, when you lose power intermittently or for longer periods of time, and many of us lost water, that’s like having a big hurricane coming through,” Tinker said.
Two important distinctions, though, were duration and breadth. Hurricanes tend to be more regional, affecting one part of the state or even more localized parts of the city and county where they strike, Tinker said. They also tend to reach land and dissipate.
“The challenge with the one we were in last week was it was so regional. Everyone was getting affected by it,” Tinker said. “As opposed to a hurricane … you can drive from Houston to Austin. Not so much in a winter storm.”
Blackburn said the winter freeze created “human suffering on a magnitude similar to what you’d have with a major hurricane,” similar to Harvey.
“Does it basically challenge your existence?” Blackburn said. “The answer is, you bet it did. I mean, to the point that people died.”
jasper.scherer@chron.com
dylan.mcguinness@chron.com
February 26, 2021 at 07:11AM
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Before winter storm, Lina Hidalgo warned of Category 5 hurricane conditions. Was she right? - Houston Chronicle
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