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phdhorn

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  1. Homestead, next door. Learned last night that Austin Energy issued an apology to us over the news, neighbor captured screenshot but I haven't seen it yet. I guess that's a start!
  2. Thanks. You can sign up with a Learn To Read program - for free! - in Austin if you need help. But I understand.
  3. One more time. Precip over for CenTex, as expected not a big deal. Weather services did really good on this event, which is not easy. Travel E of U.S. 77 today dicey - because icy. Take care. Finally, a little "glad I'm not that guy" satisfaction by relative position comment. Yesterday Austin had about 174 customers without power max in the day. 171 of them were my neighborhood. Power went out about 9:45 a.m. Sunday. After the usual AE claptrap on their outage site, and a seeming update (2 hours est. restore, which was goalpost-moved about 6 times), they extended the estimated fix out to midnight (from about noon when they gave us that one). Missus and i said skrew that, we hopped on over to a nice hotel in Lakeway for the evening - good decision. Then we read a cryptic share posted by our Bee Cave Mayor (Bee Cave has one and it's not (quite) Gomer Pyle or Helen Crump). She was sharing blamespeak by AE, stuff like "when the developer put this in he did blah blah.." and tech speak like "we need to have a loop return to allow multiple access to the location" - sounded more like a sex ed talk on fertilization than electric stuff. But what got us was this part: "We have yet to determine the actual location of the break (although somehow they seemed to know enough to blame it on "someone digging" - yet no name, location, or purpose given. Ni-i-i-ce deflection). So "after 4 hours we have no idea what happened or where to try and find the problem." Beautiful. The days before, I spent some time prepping the well as usual with space heater and a few lights, always works. But now there was no power to it - would it be pointless? That was about my only worry, the rest I said we'd deal with if/when. But we were not gonna sit in a cold house staring at dying phones. Eventually they gave "good news" on the outage app - our power would return by 7:30 p.m. Sure enough, neighbors reported power at about that time - followed by a flickering over the next hour - followed by power going out - again. Oops. No problem, you guys are pros. Apparently acc. to neighbor texts, power finally restored w/o flickering 1:30 a.m. We returned home from a great relaxing stay by about 10:30 this a.m. House warm water flowing(!) except for final stop (bathroom faucets). I opened cabinets and expect it to thaw, keeping an eye out for problems. But we have water! 3 ice/major cold event, 3 power fails. Neighborhood is pissed. We're going to go to the mayor with pitchforks and tell her to get someone from AE out here to do a damn assessment of the infrastructure. If the neighborhood wiring is akin to the Douglas phone-on-the-pole on Green Acres, then we want to know so we can outlay to fix it. "The way it was done 50 years ago" is complete bullshit. AE ran a Usain Bolt dash out here in the 70's to claim electric here with Pedernales in the area. So now, you bastiges fix it. Yeah, like that'll happen. The '21 storm I can sort of understand (though we found out our outage was due to a transformer blow and power would have remained on otherwise). The '23 Ice Dump - again a piece of infrastructure went kerplunk and we were without for 24+ hours. This one? Proud to say that in the vast, great expanse of the Greater Austin Metroplex, one neighborhood - one tiny, lil' group of settlements - mine - was out - the ONLY group outage all day. We're gonna do some stuff and stuff to get some answers. Not cool. Most of the time, the fear and paranoia preceding one of these events is regrettable if not funny (though after '21 peoples' anxieties can certainly be more understood). But apparently in our enclave, if you get below 30°, those scenarios are real. This isn't a destitute area and we want answers - the authorities say they'll give them to us after this - but of course we'll see. But if it's time to upgrade something, then DO IT. I do have a 15K big honking generator that will easily power the entire house if needed. So why didn't I set it up? Good question but long answer. However next time I'll probably drag the SOB out and get it ready if needed. With this event, even with our recent history, I couldn't conceive of losing power - ERCOT had a lot, there was NO precip (at least power-killing kind) in this forecast, zip. I thought no problem. Wrong [Trump meme]. Half-confidently expect power to hold, if not we'll motor it to the hotel for another night. So much better. So yeah, you weren't "that guy." See ya at the next weather disaster - whether real or overblown. Stay cool.
  4. Someone tapped me from the grave to see if I was alive c/o this thingy whatever. Looks like y'all got the typical things covered: panic buying (seen plenty of that myself the last 36 hours) are we going to die, 10 ton chunks of ice falling overnight Sun/Mon, -450 in the sun, the grid, Old faithful sized pipe bursts, drip vs non drip, people at the stores are assholes, Noadic flooding, 500 day supply of chili, etc. Me: going to get really cold, then it won't. Brief cold event, zero or very spotty ice event, always spotty issues with power or burst pipes, don't see any statewide power problems, mostly sporadic local, yes take it seriously but for the most part just a few vrry cold days, fortunately almost no precip to speak of with it. Shouldn't stand out from many we've had before. That's all I got. I'll look in here later tonight. Otherwise, good luck, we're not counting on you.
  5. Oopsch! <Hic!> https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2023/7/17/cops-camp-the-cuffs-on-longtime-austin-anchor?format=amp
  6. Hi. Big rains 12a-6p overnight, everybody gets a lot of wet; this one's not shaping up to be the usual nothingburger. Rain will be pretty heavy especially toward daybreak. Spotty flooding, especially along the usual suspect creeks for sure. Not widespread severe event per se but definitely can be spots of hail/high winds. This is more tropical drenching type rain. Ebbs down most of the day Saturday, spotty showers though. Still a rainy day. Sunday 12-6 same thing, not as intense but flooding here with there a possibility. Slacks off the rest of Sunday and repeat Monday, again less intense than Saturday. With this type of setup it it's really hard to gauge the depth of intense rain but the setup is primed more than most of the last yearor so. I'm leaning less apocalypse but this will be heavy rain two or three hours overnight for pretty much everyone. If it's bad enough to wake me overnight owl possibly post. May (wettest month) gonna May.
  7. Looks like the worst is over for me, the rest of you probably will get a lot of wind and rain but you should live through it...probably, maybe. Have a nice day.
  8. For all of this bluster, only one little hail core in the entire Travis county area and it went right over my house and is moving into Southwest and South austin. But it's small hail.
  9. Rain is much harder than I anticipated but it's moving so fast it won't flood.
  10. The little cell passing over me right now has small hail, nothing damaging, 50 to 60 mph winds and it's moving right toward oak Hill and South austin. Don't think it'll be real bad but could knock a few things around.
  11. I'm getting nailed easily with 50 mph winds, hard rain but brief.
  12. Not sure I've ever seen this before...
  13. Tornado warning for Georgetown and north of Round Rock, potential tornado.
  14. All Austin metro about to get severe thunderstorm warning, pea-size jail and 70 mph winds in many spots. Going to be a fun 20 minutes.
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