What a crumbling power grid means for disabled Americans
During the power outage that followed the 2021 winter storms – known in Texas as Winter Storm Uri – Rita, an Indigenous woman living with severe mental illness and congestive heart failure, tried with her then-partner to stay warm in brutal conditions in a tent on the streets of Austin with camp stoves and a propane heater. They survived, but at least six unhoused people did not survive.
In his new book Power offAngela Frederick, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, details the challenges people with disabilities faced when parts of the state’s power grid went down in February 2021. Frederick’s book describes the unique challenges people with disabilities and people with chronic illnesses face when they lose power, including local governments’ lack of resources to help them during weather disasters.
“Their worlds narrowed in ways specific to disability, and they often negotiated the constraints of disability as they strategized for survival,” Frederick wrote.
I spoke to Frederick about how policy decisions led to the horrors during winter storm Uri, what it means to be an energy-dependent person, and the need for better planning to help people with disabilities survive climate disasters.
Q. You write that Texas “is known for its exaggerated ideology of rugged individualism and its allergy to federal government intervention.” How did this lead to policy decisions that contributed to the failure of parts of the power grid in Uri?
I started this project thinking I would tell a typically Texan story. After all, we are the only state in the country with our own isolated power grid. By the end of this project, however, I came to view Texas as a canary in a coal mine. You can practically draw a line between the period of the 1990s and early 2000s, when the state deregulated the grid, and the tragedy that occurred during the Uri winter storm in 2021. This was a project led by the now-defunct Enron company. Enron executives wanted to make money from selling and trading electricity. And electricity has come to be seen as a commodity much more than a public good. From what I understand, this is not a Texas-specific story at all.
Q. What are energy dependent individuals? How are they more vulnerable during climate disasters?
Most people with disabilities and chronic health conditions could be classified as vulnerable to power. These groups may experience increased pain, illness, or limited mobility during long-term power outages due to spoiled medications or loss of assistive technology. But there is another group in the disability community that we call power addicts. These community members need power for their own survival. These community members rely on durable medical equipment powered by electricity. And these people’s lives are immediately in danger in the event of a power outage.
Q. What struck me was that some people you spoke with registered with the utility companies, emphasizing that they needed electricity to survive, but they didn’t get help. Do you think this speaks to the fact that potential solutions could still fail us?
I think this certainly speaks to the limitations of the individual disaster resilience preparedness model. There is so much focus on this long list of things we need to do to prepare for an emergency. And these are really important things to think about.
Some people I interviewed did not heed warnings about winter conditions and might have fared better if they had been better prepared with food and supplies. But also, some people I interviewed did everything imaginable to prepare for a long-term power outage, and they still found themselves in life-threatening conditions. They were told, to prepare for an emergency, to register as an electricity-dependent customer and register with STEAR, the Texas State Emergency Assistance Registry. And they dutifully registered, obtained a medical certificate and re-registered every year. And it turns out that signing up as an electricity-dependent customer doesn’t keep the lights and heat on during recurring power outages. There is no individual switch [for] every household. And it turns out that signing up for STEAR didn’t provide any additional level of security for people.
People felt really betrayed by this. They were asked to sign up for these activities, but it meant nothing when they needed it most. Ultimately, being prepared on an individual level is a good thing and is important, but the most important thing we can do to protect people from harm is to strengthen public policies so that we don’t find ourselves facing these preventable infrastructural failures.
Q. Could you explain to us what the care network is and how it can save lives when infrastructure is failing for people with disabilities?
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha defines care networks as informal networks of disabled and non-disabled people who care for each other. Unlike charitable models, which are characterized by power imbalances, care networks involve reciprocal relationships in which interdependence is highly valued. Many people with disabilities are already networked with each other through formal organizations, informal community networks, and on social media. What I discovered in my research is that members of these networks became spontaneous care networks for communities during Winter Storm Uri. The Deaf community, for example, was very organized to monitor each other and even distribute water immediately after the crisis. The blind also showed up for each other in quite remarkable ways.
Q. Weather events will continue to get worse and more frequent, and it seems like it’s only a matter of time before history repeats itself with another Uri. What changes do you think could reasonably mitigate the damage in another energy crisis?
Of course, I think our collective responsibility is to prevent these critical infrastructure failures. We must view infrastructure like electricity and water as a public good that must be fiercely protected. This is a victory for everyone, including people with disabilities.
Additionally, my book is actually a call to place people with disabilities at the center of responses to climate change and disasters. In almost every disaster, we can find stories of people with disabilities who have perished or been harmed because emergency response systems were designed around the assumption that everyone in the community can see, hear, queue, drive, etc. And people end up being excluded from community response systems when we leave disability as an afterthought.
Approaching the issue from a different perspective, I believe entire communities have great power when we place disability at the center of resilience planning. By centering the perspectives of people with disabilities, we can more easily identify points of vulnerability in our planning. And when we fix these vulnerabilities, many more people will benefit.
