NBC: 'President Biden declares major disaster in Texas following severe winter storm'

[SteveG]

Turning those stolen votes into cold hard cash in the Red State of Tejas, eh Gov. Abbott?
A REAL President


President Biden declares major disaster in Texas following severe winter storm
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pre...m-n1258442

President Joe Biden has declared a major disaster in Texas as the state reels from a severe winter storm that left millions of people without power amid freezing temperatures.

Biden's action makes federal funding available to communities across 77 counties, including hard-hit Harris County, where Houston is located. Additional disaster designations may be made after further damage assessments, the White House said Saturday morning in a statement.

“I thank President Biden for his assistance as we respond to impacts of winter weather across our state,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement. “While this partial approval is an important first step, Texas will continue to work with our federal partners to ensure all eligible Texans have access to the relief they need.”

Out of more than 260,000 outages in the United States without electricity Saturday, Texas accounted for more than 25 percent of them with 71,449 outages, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.

[SteveO]

The commercial power grid in these affected areas of Texas should be paying for every_penny of these damages including wrongful death lawsuits. They are the ones who chose to leave their customers literally in the cold after being formally given the recommendations by the Feds that would have fixed these issues 10 years ago.

I heard a report yesterday that said one of them made $650,000,000+ profit in a recent year (it mentioned this one company has almost a monopoly on Dallas power). They could have easily fixed their issues. We have storms like this all the time in KS. Not a big deal if you care about your customers instead of your profits.

[Speedy]

SteveO wrote:
The commercial power grid in these affected areas of Texas should be paying for every_penny of these damages including wrongful death lawsuits. They are the ones who chose to leave their customers literally in the cold after being formally given the recommendations by the Feds that would have fixed these issues 10 years ago.

I heard a report yesterday that said one of them made $650,000,000+ profit in a recent year (it mentioned this one company has almost a monopoly on Dallas power). They could have easily fixed their issues. We have storms like this all the time in KS. Not a big deal if you care about your customers instead of your profits.

I’d rather see the politicians who promoted this be punished.

[pdq]

Total deregulation and free-market-uber-alles sounds great on paper and sometimes works okay, at least as long as nothing goes wrong.

But then reality rears it’s ugly head.

[gabester]

SteveO wrote:
The commercial power grid in these affected areas of Texas should be paying for every_penny of these damages including wrongful death lawsuits. They are the ones who chose to leave their customers literally in the cold after being formally given the recommendations by the Feds that would have fixed these issues 10 years ago.

I agree that the power operators ought to be held accountable, but this is the gaping flaw in our legal system... They'll testify it was NOT AGAINST THE LAW and that will be true. Nevermind that the law oftentimes assumes a "good faith" execution of responsibilities, when all too often that is impossible to prove. It seems that while ignorance of the law is no excuse, bad faith insistence that the harmful (in)action was not against the law seems to be a good enough to excuse accountability.

I don't know how we fix this.