Investigation on outages
The investigations have begun into the causes of the outages that left more than four million households and businesses in the dark and cold last week. The committees are taxed with understanding the factors that led to the mass power outages and the response of the energy providers and grid operator ERCOT. Curt Morgan, the President and CEO of the energy company Vistra Corp told the House they weren’t prepared.
“We had power plants ready to produce power that could not produce any because they couldn’t get gas or to produce at its maximum output. And our power plants are built to handle hot weather. Let’s be honest, they’re not built for the winter,” says Morgan.
The state Senate opened its hearing with a meteorologist.
Even though the Legislature has a lot of very big issues in front of it this year, many lawmakers feel there is none more pressing than securing the power grid. Georgetown State Senator Charles Schwertner thinks that’s really the only focus right now.
“We’re not going to do anything until we get this done. This takes precedence over covid redistricting, everything,” says Schwertner.
Schwertner is a member of the Senate Business and Commerce Committee, which has been part of the energy hearings this week. He says they need to move quickly due to fluctuations of natural gas pricing on the international market.
Storm recovery
The Austin City Council has approved a slew of resolutions aimed at helping people recover from the storm. Mayor Steve Adler says the city is getting out of the way of speedy repairs.
“We waived residential permitting and development fees for removing trees and tree limbs. We exempted certain plummeting activities from permit requirements. We extended the deadline for certain permit applications,” Adler says.
He says that for some plumbing fixes, the council has ruled that repairs can begin immediately and the paperwork can be dealt with later. The Austin Council also directed city manager Spencer Cronk to begin working on a comprehensive plan to prepare the city for future winter storms.
“The reality is there is no good word to explain how scary, catastrophic and crippling the last 10 days have been for our community,” says Cronk.
Cronk is expected to return to council next week with some of those ideas that could be implemented sooner rather than later. One of the proposals made by counsel is to find short term housing for people who have suffered significant storm damage.
Austin bat population suffers
Austin’s bat population is having a tough go at it right now because of the storm. Megan Radke, with Texas Parks and Wildlife, tells KVUE a lot of wildlife has really been impacted badly.
“The cold temperatures were just something that most species and most people in Texas have not seen before and have not experienced before,” says Radke.
More than 30,000 bats have been found dead in the area since the cold weather hit.
Vaccines survive winter blast
Austin Public Health’s vaccine supply was able to survive last week’s winter blast, but Director Stephanie Hayden says there were some close calls when one storage location lost power, followed almost immediately by a failure of a backup generator
“We worked with fire and EMS. They were able to assist us with moving the vaccine over to another one of our locations. That location did have power,” says Hayden.
She says no doses were lost. Austin Public Health expects to have provided 37,000 doses by the end of this week, including 1st and 2nd shots,
COVID-19 update
Good news continues in Travis County’s battle against COVID-19. Fewer than 300 people are in the hospital this morning because of the virus for the first time in months, and that number is now down 285. 98 of those patients in the ICU and that number has also come down. Active cases currently stand at 1,177 and 73,136 people have recovered since last March.
Save Our Seniors
Governor Greg Abbott has announced a new effort aimed at protecting the state senior population. It’s called Save Our Seniors. Abbott says the state will deploy more than 1,100 National Guard members to vaccinate homebound seniors.
“Some National Guard will be involved in the identification and registration of the seniors in the community to get them on the list to be able to get the vaccine,” says Abbott.
The program should begin next week.
Possible lifting of COVID orders
With many counties beginning to see a drop in their COVID numbers, Governor Abbott has indicated this week he’ll be looking into an appropriate time to lift the statewide mask order. He’s also considering lifting other orders in place since last year, including business capacity limitations.
Austin home sales climb
The Austin Round Rock area sees home sales climb by 24%. Austin Board of Realtors’ Susan Horton says area homes of all sizes and price ranges are in high demand, dropping the Metro’s housing supply into a new record low of 0.4 months. She says that demand has not shrunk this month, either.
“Even during the freeze, people were buying homes, they wrote contract sight unseen, and right now we are going to have to work towards getting those closed,” says Horton
In January, the Metro median home price grew by 19% to $365,000.
This news and more on News Radio KLBJ:
https://omny.fm/shows/klbjam-flash-briefing-1/am-newscast-2-26-21
