Again?

It appears that yet again, hundreds of thousands of people in Texas are without power because they had some cold weather.

Didn't this happen last year?

You would have thought that Greg Abbot and the Texas Republicans, who run the state, would have learned from last year and done something.

Damn.  I owe myself a screen wipe.

Of course they didn't do anything:

Hundreds of thousands of businesses and households across Central and East Texas remained without power Thursday as utility crews continued scrambling to fix power lines downed by freezing rain and fallen trees.

The epicenter of the crisis was Austin, where the city-owned power utility said it didn't know when it would be able to restore power to just under 150,000 households and businesses, many of which have lacked electricity since Wednesday morning. Austin Energy had previously said it would have power restored by 6 p.m. Friday.

………

Statewide, close to 325,000 customers didn’t have electricity as of Thursday evening. The utility and Austin officials were heavily criticized for fumbling warnings about the loss of power and a lack of clarity on when it would be restored. The outages persist as residents head into another day of closed college campuses and public schools and a paused Legislature.

………

The causes of electricity outages are unlike those from the infamous 2021 winter storm, when the state’s power grid nearly collapsed during a catastrophic freeze that killed hundreds of Texans. This year’s winter storm is not as cold, prolonged or widespread as the one two years ago. And the current outages are due mostly to localized issues like downed power lines, not a problem with the power grid.

Still, this week’s weather and outages offered a fresh reminder that city and state emergency officials historically have not prioritized preparations for severe winter weather, as Texas is warm during much of the year. Exposed overhead power lines, cheaper to build than buried ones, accumulate ice during intense cold, and frozen precipitation can weigh them down and snap them, spurring and prolonging power outages even when the power grid remains stable.

Can we give Texas back to Mexico?