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Former County Residents Weather Texas Turmoil

Empty store shelves greeted many shoppers once the snow began to fall in Texas.

The historic snowstorm and shutdown that occurred in Texas this month impacted citizens across the state, including Steven and Stephanie Anderson, who have lived in Texas for over 30 years but both graduated from Dunkirk High School in 1982.

When the snow first started in Texas, the Andersons originally didn’t think much of it, thanks to their Western New York roots. But the effects on a city that doesn’t deal with significant amounts of snow made it worse for the rest of the state than it did for them.

“We got four inches of snow, which for San Antonio is an apocalyptic event,” said Steven Anderson. “But for us growing up in Western New York, it’s nothing. But Texas and central Texas especially aren’t equipped to handle that kind of weather. There’s no infrastructure to keep roads salted and plowed, so the whole city shuts down.”

In preparation for the storm, residents of Texas began doing what people all over the country did at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic: They hoarded. The Andersons had trouble finding supplies they needed, as people hit all the local grocery stores and bought all of the usual supplies. Because the people of Texas know the state isn’t equipped to handle snow, they prepared for the worst.

“That’s what drives people to hoard,” Steven Anderson said. “For us going out and driving is nothing, we’d attempt to go out and forage to find bottled water or milk and the shelves were just empty.”

Part of the reason, outside of mass buyouts, for the shelves being empty was because the stores did their best to help out both the customer base and their employees.

“Everybody goes crazy and hoards everything,” Stephanie Anderson said.

“Water, food, bread, everything. My daughter was at the grocery store the night it was supposed to get bad, and the store closed and just shoved things in people’s carts and said get out. They wanted their employees home too. The store told people with full carts to get out. They lost how much money and don’t look at it that way at all.”

The evening of Monday, Feb. 16 is when the power shut off statewide. The reasons for the statewide shutdown go back to how the power grid in Texas runs. As the grid is independent, it allows for competitive pricing. But due to the freeze, a lot of the main sources of energy in Texas were either shut down or severely limited.

“Texas power is provided by natural gas, coal, solar, and wind energy,” Steven Anderson said. “When the freeze came, the windmills took on ice, and they aren’t weatherized for that kind of weather because it rarely happens. Natural gas production slammed to halt because well heads were freezing, and they couldn’t produce required gas, so those facilities went offline. With clouds, there was no solar energy either. So you’re basically left to coal. All the sudden, it went from supporting the entire state to barely limping by.”

And those people who did have power during the storm paid for it. The independent nature of the Texas grid meant that because demand for power skyrocketed, so did the prices.

“Pricing for natural gas went up 16,000%,” Steven Anderson said. “Electricity went from 4 or 6 cents per kilowatt hour to $9 per kilowatt hour. If you had electricity in this period, you paid more in one day in consumption than you would’ve the previous month.”

The loss in power made many routine things difficult. For starters, because the Andersons have a gas stove, they couldn’t cook while their power was out. That limited the options they had available to them for food.

“We didn’t have power, and we didn’t have gas so we were either eating cold canned food or finding a fast food place that was open,” Steven Anderson said. “We were in line at a burger place for two and a half hours. You’re in a line of 40 to 50 cars stretching down the road, we had never seen anything like it before.”

But the Andersons made the best of their bad situation. They treated their food situation as if they were having a camp out, and their adult children, who are doing at home college like many students across America, enjoyed playing in the same snow that caused statewide catastrophe.

“We know the people across the street from us have two or three younger kids who had never seen snow,” Stephanie Anderson said. “The best joy of all of it was to watch our adult kids in the backyard with the dogs go crazy in the snow, and to watch the kids across the street throw snowballs at each other. There’s a lot of humanity in this state.”

Despite going as many as 12 hours at a time with no heat and going through a pipe break, the Andersons got through it on the strength of the community.

“We took care of each other,” Stephanie Anderson said. “We have neighbors who are older, and we had such good communication with everyone on the street. We would get stuff for each other. It was a classic case of a community pulling together in a bad situation. I thought we were in horrible shape when the pipe broke, because at the time we didn’t know all of San Antonio and Texas were having the same problems. We were probably the luckiest. We got through it.”

Despite having trouble with communication because of the power grid, the Andersons said they received a lot of support from the people in their old hometown. Stephanie Anderson, who’s brother is Marcus Promber of Can Kings, said that they still have a lot of love for their hometown.

“We love Dunkirk,” Stephanie Anderson said. “It always will be a true home, and we thank everybody from there who made phone calls to check on us. It was a really good feeling we had so much support.”

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