During the blackouts following the 2021 winter storms, known in Texas as Winter Storm Uri, Rita, an Indigenous woman suffering from severe mental illness and congestive heart failure, tried to stay warm with her then-partner in brutal conditions in a tent on the streets of Austin with camp stoves and a propane heater. They survived, but at least six people were left homeless didn't.
In his new book Power offUniversity of Texas at El Paso professor Angela Frederick details the challenges people with disabilities faced when the state's power grid failed in February 2021. Frederick's book outlines the unique challenges disabled and chronically ill people face when they lose power, including the lack of resources for local governments to help them during climate disasters.
“Their worlds were narrowed by the disability, and they often overcame the limitations of the disability by developing coping strategies,” Frederick wrote.
I spoke with Frederick about how policy decisions led to the horrors of winter storm Uri, what it means to be energy dependent, and how better planning is needed to help people with disabilities survive climate disasters.
TO. You write that Texas is “known for its exaggerated ideology of rugged individualism and allergy to federal government intervention.” How did this lead to policy decisions that contributed to the failure of parts of the power grid during Uri?
I started this project thinking I was going to tell a story that was uniquely Texas. After all, we are the only state in the country that has its own isolated power grid. By the end of this project, however, I began to view Texas as the canary in the coal mine. You can practically draw a line from the period of the 1990s and early 2000s, when the government deregulated the power grid, to the tragedy that occurred during Winter Storm Uri in 2021. It was a project initiated by the now defunct Enron Corporation. Enron executives wanted to make money by selling electricity. And electricity came to be seen as a commodity rather than a public good. From what I understand, this story is not at all unique to Texas.
Q. What are energy dependent people? How much more vulnerable are they during climate disasters?
Most people with disabilities and chronic illnesses can be classified as vulnerable to power. These groups may experience increased pain, illness, or reduced mobility during extended power outages due to spoiled medications or loss of assistive technology. But in the disabled community there is another group that we call power-dependent. These community members need power to survive. These community members rely on durable, electrically powered medical equipment. And the lives of these people will be in immediate danger when the power goes out.
TO. What struck me was that some of the people you spoke to signed up with utility companies saying they needed energy to survive, but they were not helped. Do you think this suggests that there may still be potential solutions let us down?
I think this definitely speaks to the limitations of the individual disaster preparedness model. There's a lot of focus on this long list of things we need to do to be prepared for an emergency. And these are really important things to think about.
Some people I spoke to ignored winter weather warnings and they could have fared better if they had been more prepared with food and supplies. But also, some people I spoke to had done everything they could to prepare for a long power outage, and they still found themselves in life-threatening conditions. They were told to be prepared for an emergency, register as an energy dependent customer and register with STEAR, the Texas Emergency Assistance Registry. And they registered in good faith, received a doctor's certificate and re-registered every year. And it turns out that registering an energy-dependent consumer does not allow maintaining electricity and heating in the event of rolling power outages. No individual switch [for] every household. And as it turned out, registering with STEAR did not provide people with any additional layers of security.
People really felt betrayed by it. They were asked to register to receive these things, but at the most difficult moment it meant nothing. Ultimately, preparation at the individual level is good and important, but the most important thing we can do to keep people out of harm's way is to strengthen public policies so we don't experience these preventable infrastructure failures.
TO. Can you talk about what care networks are and how they can save the lives of people with disabilities when infrastructure fails?
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha defines care networks as informal networks of people with disabilities and people without disabilities who care for each other. Unlike models of philanthropy, which are characterized by power imbalances, networks of care involve reciprocal relationships in which interdependence is highly valued. Many people with disabilities are already connected to each other through formal organizations, informal community networks, and social media. In my research, I discovered that the people in these networks became networks of spontaneous community aid during Winter Storm Uri. The deaf community, for example, was very organized, checking on each other and even handing out water immediately after the crisis. Blind people also showed amazing abilities to each other.
TO. Climate events will continue to worsen and become more frequent, and it looks like it may be a matter of time before history repeats itself with a new Uri. What few changes do you think could reasonably mitigate the damage during the next energy crisis?
Well, of course, I think it's our collective responsibility to prevent these failures in critical infrastructure. We must view infrastructure such as electricity and water as a public good that must be carefully protected. This is a win for everyone, including people with disabilities.
Additionally, my book is really a call to put people with disabilities at the center of the fight against climate change and disasters. In almost every disaster, we can find stories of people with disabilities who have died or been injured because emergency response systems were designed on the assumption that everyone in the community can see, hear, stand in long lines, drive, etc. And people end up excluded from community response systems when we leave disability on the back burner.
Coming at it from a different perspective, I think that if we put disability at the center of resilience planning, it has enormous power for entire communities. By focusing on the issues of people with disabilities, we can more easily identify vulnerabilities in our planning. And when we fix these vulnerabilities, many more people will benefit.
