A small Texas city west of Austin remains under tight water restrictions amid a significant drought. After days of being at the highest emergency level for water conservation, officials said Monday that those restrictions have only slightly been loosened, limiting water consumption to “indoor use only” until further notice.
Texas: no water and AC in the summer, no heat and electricity in the winter
I’m feeling so owned right now.
This is somehow California’s fault.
If California wasn’t a liberal hellhole then all the MAGAs wouldn’t have moved to Texas! Fucking California sending their people here to steal our resources!
Sorry for all the downvotes. I understood it was sarcasm.
Unfortunately there are more MAGA idiots in California than there are in Texas. They didnt move there because of that one thing alone.
As an outsider, can I ask why is there no ac in summer, nor electric in winter there?
As an outsider I assume it’s because their ‘independant’ (read: under-regulated) power grid collapses every time all that stuff turns on.
Recently we had an exceptionally cold winter staying below freezing for multiple days. Since winter is usually fairly temperate with most days having lows in the 40s (I usually only use the heater at night and have windows open during the day). and only going a degree or two below freezing for a couple of hours, a lot of houses here are not particularly suited to cold weather. We have fairly inefficient resistive electric heat in many houses, and pipes are not particularly well insulated for cold weather.
It got well below freezing for a couple of days, and already several power plants were shut down for maintenance since winter is typically low demand. Anyway, all of this combined to result in the grid being overloaded, doing rolling blackouts, and then peoples pipes froze as well because of that.
Also the Texas power grid is isolated from the other US grids so importing power is not an option.
Since then I have noticed a lot more solar farms, mini natural gas peaker plants/backup generators and other upgrades being put in on backroads when I go for a motorcycle ride.
Nothing in the article about agricultural use.
If I’m reading their USDA census data correctly, over 2/3 of the entire county is used for farming (336,688 acres). Of which 79% is pastureland.
I also wonder whether that city has any golf courses. If so, it’s almost guaranteed that they’ll be exempt too
But what about the lawns?!
Insanity. And they keep building more homes.
Texas legislature outlawing local water restrictions in 3, 2, 1…
That would be extreme even for Texas. Texas has laws in place to prevent HOAs from prohibiting water conservation efforts such as xeriscaping, growing native grasses instead of exotic, rain barrels, etc. Most of Texas undergoes drought restrictions already. If we didn’t, we would certainly run out of water. Banning water conservation would be stupid even by Texas standards.
Granted, Texas also does stupid shit such as restricting water usage in communities while pumping out that same water to sell to 3rd parties.
