Welcome to WeeklyWilson.com, where author/film critic Connie (Corcoran) Wilson avoids totally losing her marbles in semi-retirement by writing about film (see the Chicago Film Festival reviews and SXSW), politics and books----her own books and those of other people. You'll also find her diverging frequently to share humorous (or not-so-humorous) anecdotes and concerns. Try it! You'll like it!
Cecile DeFrance, female star of “Hereafter” and me, after the Chicago premiere of Clint Eastwood’s new film.
With John C. Reilly at the Chicago Film Festival.
William F. Nolan & Connie Wilson. Austin, Texas, Horror Writers Conference.
Connie Wilson & Deidre Sommerville with the Silver Feather Award.
Author Jane Smiley, winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for her Novel “1,000 Acres” and me at lunch in Honolulu at Spellbinders Conference.
Antonio Villaraigosa, the Mayor of Los Angeles since 2005 and Chairman of the Democratic Party.
A few seconds before this was taken, Dennis Massoud cautioned me about touching the sand on the sides of the “chair.” Quantas Airlines sand sculpture in Sydney, Australia
Book signing in Australia.
Craig and I at a restaurant in Darling Harbour with our friends Don and Cath Zartarian.
Four-year-old twin granddaughters Elise (left) and Ava (right) Wilson, to whom the book is dedicated. (They’ll be helping me write them, from now on.)
With Harry Connick, Jr., backstage at the Chicago Theater on my birthday.
Illinois Women’s Press Association Silver Feather Award (2nd win in 3 years).
With Rob Reiner in Chicago at the Icon Theater on June 18, 2014 preview of new film “And So It Goes.”
With Liv Ullman.
With New York Times Best-selling author Jon Land.
Rolling Stones, July 23, with the daughter, down front.
Haskell Wexler and me, May 22, 2012, Grant Park, Chicago
Jerry O’Heir (Lenny in “Middle Man” and Jerry Gergich on “Parks & Recreation”) at the Chicago Film Festival.
At Lake Okoboji, less than one week from delivering daughter Stacey in 1987.
(Left to Right) Scott Beck, Connie Wilson and Bryan Woods at SXSW (Austin, TX) on March 10, 2018.
Opening Night of the Windy City Film Festival in Chicago, as a Screenplay Finalist.
(l to r), Connie Wilson, Patrick of the omnipresent hat, and Meiling Jin, CEO of Studio Meiling Productions, LLC.
San Antonio Film Festival.
Belmont Town Hall Press Room at the Belmont Town Hall Meeting, 2008, Nashville, Tennessee, 2008.
Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Yes, I go all the way back to Lincoln), Too bad his beard is falling off!
Press, inside of the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado at the DNC in 2008.
New Year’s Eve in New York City’s Times Square.
Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. (And isn’t that Johnny Depp on the left?)
Hawaii Spellbinders’ Conference.
Elise (L) and Ava (R) at the Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore in Chicago.
“Lily Topples the World,” SXSW Online Film Festival, 2021.
Today is March 13th, Saturday, and it sticks in my brain pan as the day that my husband and I went out to see “The Way Back” at a local cinema. The place was deserted and, when I asked about upcoming films, the news was not good.
By that weekend, we were “sheltering in place” and we were going to be sheltering in place for one full year. My hair appointments became non-existent, My nails grew out and became a problem. I was giving hair cuts to my husband. I would not enter a movie theater for 7 months to see “Tenet” at the Regal Cinema (now closed) in Moline, Illinois.
During that long Covid-19 year my husband and I would contract the virus and be sick for two weeks (in October). We would venture out perhaps twice (once to a drive-in) to see movies, but the flow of new films would cease, so the sacrifice that no movies means, to me, as a bona fide movie buff, was slightly mollified by the realization that there were very few new good films coming out. All of us were glued to our respective television sets, and that is where I would cover the Chicago International Film Festival, the Denver Film Festival, Sundance, and, this coming week, SXSW, virtually, online.
I am Press at SXSW, again, and the films I will be seeing from March 16-20 will include the following, (with reviews here and on The Movie Blog.com and perhaps a few on QuadCity.com):
Tuesday- March 16th
“Demi Lovato: Dance with the Devil” (Credit: OBB Media @ the SXSW Online Film Festival 2021.)
“Hysterical – top female comics perform in a special.
“The Oxy Kingpins” – a documentary.
“Aretha” – a documentary about Aretha Franklin
“Lily Topples the World” – young girl sets up blocks to “fall.”
“Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil” – the story of Demi Lovato’s close call with death from a drug overdose.
“The Thing That Ate the Birds” – horror
Wednesday, March 17
“Recovery” –
“The Return: Life After Isis”
“Tom Petty: Somewhere You Feel Free” (documentary)
Waze & Odyssey” with appearances by George Michael et, al.
Not Going Quietly – feature film
United States vs. Reality Winner – a documentary about White House leaks
Offseason
Thursday- March 18
“Swan Song” (Credit Chris Stephens, SXSW Online Film Festival 2021).
“Swan Song” – I actually have already seen this one, about a hairdresser called out of retirement in the nursing home to do a dead friend’s hair. The dead friend is Linda Evans (“Dynasty”). The hairdresser is German actor Udo Kier. The co-star is Stiffler’s Mom, from “American Pie,” Jennifer Coolidge. Todd Phillips directs.
“The Lost Sons” – fascinating documentary about a boy kidnapped at birth from Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago only to be returned to his parents 2 years later. Or is the boy found in New Jersey really their son? A fascinating documentary with many twists and a Chicago setting.
“The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Mary Johnson – one of the few feature length films
“Violet” – a Justine Bateman project
“Alone Together” – a documentary about Charlie XCS
“Sound of Violence”
“The Spine of Night” – animated, with voices by Patton Oswalt and others. The last 2 are “midnight fare,” meaning scary films.
Friday, March 19th
“Late Night Girls Club” – Samantha Bee and Amber Ruffin
“Cruel Summer” Q&A”
The festival does not end until Saturday, but my husband and I are scheduled to get our second Pfizer shots on Saturday and Sunday, which is his birthday. We are making a true celebration out of it, staying at the VanZandt hotel downtown in a pricey room and dining out with the son and daughter-in-law, so no closing night film for me. Check back at WeeklyWilson.com for reviews of the above.
View from Room 808 in the Sonesta Hotel in downtown Austin.
Today’s Austin American-Statesman column by Ken Herman contained the headline: “Abbott to Texans: You’re On Your Own.”
In addition to thoroughly disapproving of Governor Abbott’s recent dictum to the state that all mitigation effort are off and everything is 100% “open” in the state of Texas now, Herman ended his column with these words:
“Abbott’s bottom line is we’re all on our own to do what we think is best. Businesses are free to open to whatever capacity they want. And customers are free to choose which businesses to patronize.
Sounds very Texan. The problem is the worst decisions of the worst among us could become a determining variable about when real normalcy returns for the rest of us. As we have seen since Day One of this life-threatening mess, we’re all still in this together.
Snide sidenote: Hey! It could have been worse. Abbott could have put ERCOT in charge!”
(*ERCOT, for the non-Texans out there, stands for The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which turned out to be ironically named when the entire system failed.)
For those of you who have not investigated Donald J. Trump’s remarks at CPAC, here is a run-down of the veracity of his remarks.
Trump:‘Had we had a fair election, the results would have been much different.” 63 court cases were either thrown out of court or denied outright. There are always isolated cases of fraud and irregularities, but none that would have changed the outcome of the election. Joseph R. Biden won by an 8 million vote margin.
Trump: “The Democrats used the pandemic as an excuse to change all of the election rules without the approval of their state legislatures, therefore making it illegal.” The “change” to election rules was to allow more voters to use absentee ballots, since there was real risk from voting in person during a pandemic that has killed 500,000 citizens. The Constitution leaves the matter of how elections are conducted to state legislatures.
Trump: “This election was rigged, and the Supreme Court and other courts didn’t want to do anything about it.” Texas tried to overturn the election results of 4 swing states. Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito thought that the Supreme Court should be hearing such a case. The Trump administration looked high and low to find a state attorney who would lodge the lawsuit for them and—finally and reluctantly—agreed to let the less-than-virtuous Paxton of Texas file the case. Courts at all levels, many of them with GOP-appointed judges, threw out all but one of Trump’s challenges, and the only one that held up allowed observers to move closer to those counting the votes. Even if the Supreme Court had agreed to throw out Pennsylvania’s votes, Joe Biden would still have won in the Electoral College.
“Bee Gone: A Political Parable”
Trump: “We seem to have more votes than we have people in Detroit.” Detroit has a voting-age population of 503,934. Detroit’s City Clerk’s website says that 250,138 residents voted.
Trump: “In Pennsylvania, they had hundreds of thousands of more votes than they had people voting.”
3 million voters requested absentee ballots by the Oct. 27th deadline. In total, about 6.9 million votes were counted in Pennsylvania’s presidential election. The number of registered Pennsylvania voters in 2020 was just over 9 million.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that a man who told something like 35,000 documented lies while in office found it difficult to speak the truth at the CPAC conference.
Twenty-three million Americans are now completely vaccinated against Covid-19 and 70 million have had the first (of two) shots. I am among the seventy million who just received the first shot of the Pfizer vaccine, today, at 12:30 p.m., at an HEB grocery store in Austin, Texas.
Stephen K. Austin Sonesta Hotel, 701 S. Congress Ave., Austin, Tx.
Sonesta Hotel, formerly the Intercontinental Hotel in Austin, Texas.
We have been placing ourselves on various lists (State list, HEB, CVS, Walgreen’s) for months now. I even got a local doctor, thinking that might help (it didn’t).
I finally took to tweeting to various entities and wrote an e-mail to HEB, since the state website seemed completely unworkable. That site would ask you to select a pasword, which we did. When we’d try to check back in to see if there was any vaccine available (usually not), it would not accept our passwords, even though we knew what they were. We would then be forced to say “Forgot password.” The site would say it was going to send us an e-mail (to our e-mail boxes), an e-mail which never arrived.
I pinned my hopes on HEB, which has performed brilliantly during the pandemic for well over a year. Their Favor delivery service has been phenomenal, and far better than similar services in the Midwest. Today, I spent 20 minutes sitting in a chair waiting for my name to be called outside the pharmacy inside the HEB store at 2701 E. 7th St. in Austin, Texas. Later, I wrote to HEB, “You may have literally saved my life.”
We are slated to travel to Mexico near Easter and the thought of travel at this time is scary and travel without a vaccination is terrifying. We already had Covid-19 in October, but getting the vaccination, as many of you know, has been an arduous process.
So, I kept pestering anyone I could think of to pester, with tweets, phone calls and e-mail. After writing about this to HEB, I called one of their stores and asked to be connected to the pharmacy. I held for a “live” person for a long time, but after we spoke she said there was one spot, at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 28th (today). As she was making that appointment for me, another opened up and she said she only had 8 minutes to fill it, for my husband, who was booked on Saturday, Feb. 27th. This means that our second shots will take place on or near his birthday (March 21st).
It also means that I got the Big Bright Idea of driving downtown and getting a hotel room nearby for one night. We dined at the Roaring Fork and made it to our appointments and I have included pictures of the Stephen K. Austin Sonesta Hotel, which used to be the Intercontinental Hotel at 701 Congress Avenue (until a month ago.) I had always wanted to see the rooms in this hotel, since it is Grand Central Station during the normal SXSW Film Festival.
Former Trump administration neo-Nazi and Breitbart spawn Steven Miller has been invited to address GOP members of Congress about the Democratic plan for an 8-year path to citizenship for illegal aliens.
This won’t be Miller’s first time trying to stop pro-immigrant legislation. Back when he worked for then-Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Miller “played a key role in ensuring the failure of a comprehensive immigration bill introduced by a bipartisan group of senators who became known as the Gang of Eight,” the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) said. Miller in fact “drafted a 30-page memo that Mr. Sessions shared with the House Republican caucus,” [The New York Times, 2019].
While the Senate under former Democratic Sen. Harry Reid passed legislation by a wide, bipartisan 67-27, former Republican House Speaker John Boehner blocked it in his chamber. Now House Republicans are bringing Miller back.
“This comes on the heels of news that Donald Trump’s will address immigration in his upcoming CPAC speech. Clearly, the Republican Party is still the Party of Trump,” immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice said. “The GOP is doubling down on ugly xenophobia and racism rather than trying to grow its appeal and reclaim lost suburban voters.” They are also trying to clamp down on absentee voting and are actively trying to gerrymander districts that didn’t go GOP in the last presidential election.
The organization said that the “ongoing political transformation of Georgia captures the perils of this approach.”
“In Georgia, a multiracial majority—sparked by the combination of bottom-up organizing by Stacey Abrams, Republican extremism, and changing demographics—delivered two Senate seats for Democrats and flipped an important electoral college state for President Biden,” the group said in the statement. It points to a new NBC News report finding that Democrats’ most significant gains from 2008 to 2020 came from three suburban Georgia counties.
In a testament to this shift, one of those Georgia counties, Gwinnett, elected a sheriff who ran and won on ending a racist and flawed agreement with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.
Joining Miller to “brief” House Republicans are two other notoriously anti-immigrant officials from the previous administration: former acting ICE director Tom Homan, and former acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan. Mark recently became an official hate group member, joining the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigrant organization deemed a hate group by the SPLC, as a “Senior Fellow.”
“Instead of changing course, working to reclaim suburban voters, and trying to expand their appeal, Republicans seem intent on speaking only to the cul-de-sac of the Trump base, re-emphasizing that white power is the beating heart of the party,” America’s Voice executive director Frank Sharry said. “They seem to gloss over the fact that Trump’s demonization of immigrants and refugees backfired badly, helping the Republican Party in the past four years to lose the White House, the Senate and the House.”
“Lone Star Deception” (available on Amazon) with Eric Roberts and Anthony Ray Parker.
After 3 months of fruitless search on various computers I managed to get both of us appointments for vaccinations with the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine the old-fashioned way: I called.
Believe me, we’ve been trying very hard to use the State of Texas website to sign up, and, as that turned out to be a pipe dream, we put ourselves on lists with Walgreen’s, CVS, HEB, and anywhere else we could think of, including some that would have meant driving several hours to Houston or Dallas. Nothing worked.
The way the State of Texas site works is you sign up and create a password, which we both did.
Then, you are to sign in to check on the availability of vaccine, which we tried to do, but the machine would never take our passwords (despite knowing whatthey were), so we’d say “Forgot Password” (even though we had not.) The computer would promise to send an e-mail to our mailbox, an e-mail which never arrived. And so it went.
I had a lot of faith in HEB, given the national publicity that came about when they were so on the ball about the impending pandemic that they actually sent observers to China and worked out a system for their stores to work smoothly during this bad time. And they did. The grocery delivery was wonderful, unlike the Midwest, and even after the catastrophic power failures and water outages, most stores were up and running by yesterday with a full complement of food. (We went to one in Kyle).
Today, the HEB website showed 64 doses of the vaccine were available near us, but, when I tried to sign on and get an appointment, it would say, “No appointment times available.”
“Lone Star Deception,” Eric Roberts, Anthony Parker.
I finally made a phone call to HEB, even though it meant holding for a very long time to get to a “live” person.
Within 10 minutes my husband had been assigned a time on Saturday at noon, and during the booking of his spot, I got one at 12:30 on Sunday, this coming weekend (2/27 and 2/28). Then, since the store is in downtown Austin, I got fancy and booked us a hotel room and dinner at the hotel on the corner in downtown Austin where I have spent many SXSW runs drifting through, waiting, or interviewing film folk. The rate was reasonable ($150) and the Roaring Fork within the hotel is my very favorite downtown Austin restaurant—so far. [The hotel changed hands about one month ago, and is now a Sonesta Hotel, which is probably why I think of it under a completely different name. I would have sworn it was called the Intercontinental, but I may be thinking of Chicago.]
Now, news of what may well be my last podcast, this coming Thursday, Feb. 25, from 7 to 8 p.m.
In keeping with the spirit, I’ve booked the Writer/Director of “100 Days to Live.” Ravin Gandhi is a first-time feature film director who is really the CEO of GMM Nonstick Coating in Chicago.
It was on his bucket list to make a film, and that film is currently streaming on your TV set. I interviewed its female lead on February 4th.
Eric Roberts & Anthony Ray Parker.
I noted, in going back through the 45 or so interviews I’ve done on my podcast, that 8 of them have been with Directors or Producers or Stars. Of that number, five were first-time directors of a feature film. Those, going back to the beginning, were Ed Dezevallos of “Lone Star Deception,” Jonathan Baker of “Inconceivable,” Gretl Claggett of “Stormchaser,” Chelsea Christer of “Bleeding Audio,” Ryan Bliss of “Alice Fades Away” and, now, Ravin Gandhi of “100 Days to Live.” Also among my podcasts I spoke with Heidi Johannesmeier (of “100 Days to Live”) and Sergio Rizzuto of “Hard Kill” (2nd lead opposite Bruce Willis) and THE Eric Roberts, who had a leading role in “Lone Star Deception.”
I’ve written up 20 questions for Ravin and if, for some reason, he does not join me on what may well be my last show, I’ll tell you what I learned from the Writers/Directors/Producers and Stars of the other films I’ve both reviewed (on Weekly Wilson and The Movie Blog) and on the air.
Join us “live” at 7 p.m. (CDT) on Thursday, February 25th. If you have a question, the call-in number is 866-451-1451.
Texas Tales: “Our Government in Texas Failed Us This Week”
That quote from a Texas representative Lizzzie Fletcher interviewed on CNN at 2:17 p.m. (CT).
Other words of wisdom come from folks like John Bridges, the Executive editor of the Austin American-Statesman.
In Texas, the buck doesn’t stop here; it just gets on a plane to Mexico, [making Ted Cruz one of the first Latinos to flee the United States for a better life in Mexico].
Governor Abbott spent more time in his 4-days-too-late Press Conference talking about the Green New Deal than he did talking about the raw deal he and his cronies have dealt the state of Texas. The recommendations for winterization of the power grid were decades old, but Texas authorities in power sought to shift the blame to wind and solar panel, when that is not the truth.
The very idea of a Republican politician lying to protect his political future is not new, but it was refined to a daily performance art under DJT. And, in Texas, the man who said of his initial time in office in a 2013 speech to fellow Republicans,”I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home,” now has had to ask the federal government for help in a crisis that could be more costly than Hurricanes as famous as Katrina. President Biden will visit Texas this week to see how the federal government can help the state—14 million of us still boiling our water, if we have any—recover from the debilitating effects of a severe weather event that combined freezing temperatures with power and water failures.
First, in an attempt to shove the responsibility off onto solar and wind power not performing during the freak winter storm, Abbott went on Sean Hannity’s television show and blamed the entire mess on Green renewable energy. This was false. The power outages were due to freezing temperatures affecting natural gas plants, with uninsulated pipes causing gases with heavy carbon chains to liquify and intake or outtake pipes freezing. Oil wells can freeze up and did.
According to ERCOT’s Fuel Mix report, the state’s largest energy source last year was natural gas as 46% of the state’s energy needs. Wind supplied 23% and, if properly weatherized as experts had warned the blades should be, these fixtures continue working in sub-freezing temperatures. Coal supplied 18% of the state’s power, nuclear 11% and solar only 2%.
Actually, although half of the state’s wind supply turbines were frozen, on Tuesday the unfrozen turbines collectively produced up to 1,000 megawatts more energy than grid operators expected, because of the high winds that the snowstorm brought. ERCOT CEO Bill Magness said, “It appears that a lot of the generation that has gone offline today has been primarily due to issues on the natural gas system at large.”
In an editorial headlined “Texans Deserve to Have Government That Works” Executive Editor John Bridges (Austin American-Statesman) noted that, “For too long, Texans have elected people more interested inn dismantling government than actually running one. As we painfully learned this week, small government sounds good right up until the power goes out and the faucets run dry.”
Bridges further noted that the priorities of our elected officials, like Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and Attorney General Paxton, have been (1) their own political futures (2) their cronies and (3) their business interests. Right now, in fact, Paxton is embroiled in several legal investigations into impropriety with a local real estate developer, and his entire staff has blown the whistle on him, calling his behavior towards them punitive. Those lawsuits and others involving Paxton highlight why he was the Attorney General who filed the complaint attempting to throw out the electoral college votes of 6 other states on behalf of former President Trump. (The Trump administration didn’t really want Paxton, because of his unsavory reputation and the various investigations into his unethical behavior, but he was the only volunteer to come forward to lodge the spurious lawsuit.)
Bridges goes on to focus on the issues that these elected officials chose to waste time on, rather than making sure our power and water would work if there were a catastrophic weather event. What were those other oh-so-important issues that tied up much of the Texas legislatures time?
The use of transgender bathrooms.
Restricting access to abortion.
Promoting or protecting the out-of-control gun culture.
Suing the federal government for political sport—at least 44 lawsuits during the Obama years by Abbott.
Restricting local taxing authority, much of which is spent on public safety.
Forbidding cities from controlling their own police budgets.
Finding ways to further restrict voter access, such as the ONE mailbox that was to serve as the drop-box for voters in a large Texas city of millions.
Rick Perry—-Abbott’s predecessor as Governor of Texas—famously said that Texans would rather endure a few days of blackouts than have the feds (the department he recently and ironically ran asU.S. energy secretary) involved in Texas’ energy grid. Let’s not forget that this is the same Rick Perry that Donald Trump mocked, saying he put glasses on to “make himself look smarter” and the student who got a grade of “D-“ in a college class entitled “Meat.”
So, as Bridges says, “Speak for yourself, Rick!”
Texans shivering in their own homes, burning candles and their own wood furniture for warmth, and harvesting snow to flush toilets do not agree. If Texas wants its own power grid and wants to run it “the Texas way,” its government must tirelessly regulate, inspect, and enforce the efficiency of that power grid.
An Abilene man froze to death in his bed. The 60-year-old’s death was one of six tied to the freezing cold reported in and around that western Texas city this week, the Associated Press reported. A Houston woman and her child died from carbon monoxide poisoning after seeking warmth in their car. As snow blanketed much of Texas on Sunday, an 11-year-old boy in the Houston area gleefully played outside. Seeing the snow was a first for the boy, who came to the U.S. from Honduras two years ago with his mother, she told the Houston Chronicle.
Less than 24 hours later, as temperatures plunged to near single digits and homes across the state lost power, that boy died.
Early that same morning, a San Antonio man left his house for a dialysis appointment — but he never arrived. His wife found him unresponsive nearly two hours later in the frigid weather.
A Black Austin renter described how he grabbed a few belongings from his back-of-the-house apartment and ran for his life. The couple in the front of the house, who had tried to heat the building with their barbecue grill, died in the fire.
The Houston Chronicle reports that more than two dozen people in Harris County alone have died from events related to this week’s icy weather. And the threat is far from over. Thousands of Texans are still without electricity, food and clean water. The entire state is under a boil order for water.
Texas was not prepared for the lowest temperatures it has experienced in 70 years and recent inspections of the power grid that declared it ready for the winter were wrong. It wasn’t.
Much like the unwillingness to acknowledge the problem, Texas stuck its governmental head firmly in the Trumpian sand and did very little to prepare for the onslaught of the pandemic that has now killed 41,000 Texans. Given months to develop a plan for the vaccine rollout, both state and local governments failed to develop and communicate a workable plan.
We are in the “1b” group of citizens with pre-existing conditions, older than 75, who should have been contacted to schedule an appointment for a Covid-19 shot. We have been trying for literally months to find any source of vaccine. The state website crashes immediately. Once you fill out your name, rank and serial number, including selecting a password, you learn that you must “check back later” to see if there is any vaccine availability. (There never is). Lately, when we attempt to sign in, the site says our passwords are wrong, despite having noted them upon entry. We then try to get a “new” password and the site promises to send a note to our mailboxes, but does not. Therefore, the state health site is worthless.
Then there are the sign-up lists for Walgreen’s, CVS, HEB, and the like. Yes, we’re on all of them, too, plus lists that exist in cities as far-flung as Houston and Dallas. It is nearly March and our constant “checking back” yields only the words “No vaccine available. Check back later.”
I even went so far as to secure a local doctor, hoping that having a local doctor for our winter months’ residence, might help. It hasn’t. I fear that our April trip to Mexico is going to see us as the only older members of the family group who have not had even one Covid-19 shot. While we may have some small amount of immunity from contracting a mild case in October, will that be enough? Or will we, too, become victims of this failure to try to protect the citizens of Texas and the United States.
As Bridges says, in his concluding remarks, “Texans don’t ask much of our government. But is it too much to ask that government not try to kill us?”
From this morning’s “Austin American-Statesman,” comes this assessment of our Texas water problem.
We’re here in Austin (TX), experiencing the black-outs and lack of water along with the rest of the state. The cold weather meant below freezing. As a northeast Iowa native, not impressed by the cold part. However, down here, things immediately went to hell in a hand basket. Nobody could/would/should drive! So, that’s how it started, but that’s not how it’s ending. Now that it’s back in the above freezing range, things are changing, but there are still major, massive issues that we are right in the middle of, unfortunately.
“Tens of thousands of leaks in the system have wreaked havoc on Austin’s water supply,” said Austin Water Director Greg Meszaros. That has been compounded by an untold number of burst pipes in homes. Tuesday night and Wednesday morning Austin Water saw 325 million gallons leak out of the system, where, typically Austinites typically use 100 million gallons a day.
Meszaros: “That is an incredible amount of water and nothing I’ve ever seen before at that rate,” said Meszaros, “So that’s what we’re managing is to not return to that state of affairs, where 100 million gallons of water could leak out of our system in one night.”
This means that Austin Water will need to methodically restart portions of the system to prevent leaks.
“It’s going to be a multiday process to restore pressure and service and then clear the system for use. It’s really difficult to give precise timelines for portions of our section of our system. We don’t know what we don’t know. And we don’t know how long some of them are going to take to fix.”
Reservoirs are now being refilled. Thirteen million Texans are under boil water notices, including us. The effect has been acutely felt in the city, where a loss in water pressure forced evacuations at St. David’s South Austin Medical Center late Wednesday. All surrounding cities (Pfugerville, Bastrop, etc.) are also affected by the boil order.
Water systems under a boil water notice likely will face a logjam from state regulators as water pressure stabilizes. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality requires testing to ensure no unsafe bacteria is in the supply before lifting the advisories. Timelines for water service to return to normal remain elusive. Said one official, “I just feel like this is such a catastrophic failure on every level. If I wasn’t so consumed with finding a functioning shower or a functioning toilet, I would be so angry.”
Supposedly, 13 million of us have no water, at the moment. Thirty-plus people have died, estimated.
Now, say the officials, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality requires testing to ensure no unsafe bacteria is in the supply before lifting the advisories. The environmental commission is coordinating with the EPA to bring in mobile testing labs from out of state.
PULLING A CRUZ: I have suggested that we go home to Illinois temporarily. Craig is always in such a Big Hurry to go home to “do taxes”, so I’m not sure why he is resistant to going back to Illinois, but he is. I refer to it as “pulling a Cruz.” When we hit Wednesday and I’ve gone one full week without a shower/bath or hair wash, that could change. And we cannot, for the life of us (literally) get a Covid-19 shot here, despite putting ourselves on lists in Houston, Dallas, and about 10 places in Austin. We are definitely old enough for 1B and I have 4 underlying health conditions (things like asthma), so there’s that. I even went so far as to go find a doctor, thinking that might help. No such luck.
If I were to try to go home alone, I’d face all kinds of things that have been “turned off” that I know nothing about turning back on. I have to admit that I did not go to the basement and fart around with the water heater, etc. so if I go home alone, I’d face figuring out how to get things to “work” at home, or I’d be in pretty much the same situation I am here. I’m not afraid to fly (despite the pandemic) and we can fly free, thanks to the daughter’s job with Southwest Airlines, but it pretty much needs to be both of us going and only one of us votes for returning to the deep freeze so that we have running water.
Stacey, the daughter, who lives in Nashville has been with us since last Saturday. She is going to make a pilgrimage to the Walgreen’s (whichfinally opened for restricted hours and closes at 6 p.m.) to try to get us some dry shampoo.
I last had a bath and washed my hair on Wednesday, February 17th. It is now Saturday, February 20th.
I had 4 prescriptions that I had phoned in before the deluge. I was fearful that they would go back on the shelves. When Walgreen’s opened for limited hours (closes at 6 p.m.) I was Car #12; it took 35 minutes to get to the drive-through window to pick up my prescriptions. Mission accomplished.
We have no water. We tried to order pizza to eat, but very few pizza places were open. The one we found that WAS open had run out of pizza dough, but we were able to get lasagna, as long as we ordered right then, because they were closing down at 6 p.m. (It was 4:30 p.m. and weordered right then.) Many gas stations are closed, because they are out of gas.
Beto O’Rourke taking questions in Davenport on 5/20/19.
El Paso has largely avoided this disaster because they learned from the 2011 freeze that hit. They planned for colder weather and, as a result, the built-in redundancies that should have been built in WERE built in. It is also not on the same power grid as the rest of Texas. They are on the western power grid. Texas is the only state to have its very own power grid. ERCOT failed Big Time. Other states can turn to their neighbors, but Texans, in general, don’t want to depend on their neighbors. El Paso took itself OFF the Texas power grid (ERCOT) and went ON to the western power grid (there are only 3 power grids, nationwide) after a 2011 bad freeze. Therefore, El Paso avoided the woes we are currently experiencing, firsthand. And I do acknowledge that, initially, we had power (pretty much throughout) and only lost our water completely yesterday. Before, we had very low water pressure, but we had a little bit of water. No more. Our laundry and dirty dishes are building up. There was talk of putting a garbage bag in the toilet and pooping into it, to keep flushing down. I’ll be on a plane to the Midwest before it comes to that. People are putting saran wrap on plates, so that they don’t have to deal with a “dirty” plate that cannot be washed.
I’m planning on a small spaghetti jar for tonight’s dinner, as we had one lb. of hamburger in the freezer and we have spaghetti noodles. The hard part will be the water. While we have a bathtub full of water, we have very little bottled water. The feds are supposedly sending water in, but where is it? No idea. [Probably the same place our Covid-19 shot is: unavailable to us and met with the response, “We don’t have any.”]
After the spaghetti and some grilled cheese, we have a few frozen things (that, fortunately, did not go bad because our power stayed on), so we can eat our way through a couple steaks, some frozen pot pies. We have some canned food (soups, vegetables), but we are leaving the land of “What’s for dinner?” with a regular menu. I’ve made salmon and steak and a 10-lb. turkey and we are pretty much “out” of food, with no grocery stores having any for sale, apparently, since Craig just came back from Randall’s a few minutes ago declaring the shelves bare. The HEB stores warehouse all of their stuff in San Antonio warehouses and, until today, roads were considered pretty impassable. Now, with the warming temperatures, driving up to restock their stores from their warehouses is do-able, but did the warehouses storing the food lose power when the outage was statewide, like the stores did, and, if so, is there anything up in San Antonio that is still good that can restock the HEB stores here in Austin? I know that one employee had half-gallon jugs of milk in a wheelbarrow on her front porch in our subdivision, inviting the neighbors to “help themselves.” All were gone within minutes and good luck in finding eggs or milk or water, since then.
We are using water we melted from the snow to flush the toilets, sparingly. I’m pretty much treating the flushing like when we took the lobster dinner cruise on those old pirate ship look-alikes, which would not let you put paper in the water because, although they had toilets, they were not great toilets.
So, yes, we have power.
(Craig just tried going to the grocery store: no eggs, no milk, no chicken, no water. A line waiting to get in. I had to wait for 35 minutes in my car to get the prescriptions that I had phoned in well before the cold weather arrived. I was the 12th car in line. They were closing down early and have adopted early closing as their norm now.)
So, I’m not sure what is going to go down here in the next week. I’ve agreed to give this “we are camping out” lifestyle a green light for the week, but I honestly do not think they will have this situation “fixed” in a week, and I wonder how long it WILL take.
Obviously, there are going to be investigations and studies about the power failures. The headline on p. 5B today reads: “Just crippling: Texans Devastated.” It details the people trying to find food at HEB, which had to close 10 stores in the chain, because they, too, lost power. By Thursday the number in Texas without power was down to 450,000 from 4 million. Harris County officials have a feature where residents can click through and see which major food stores are open. As bad as this was, it was almost worse, being second or minutes away from a catastrophic power outage. Texas makes more power than any other state in the union, but the weather disaster was unparalleled. Coldest it had been in 70 years, and it wasn’t really THAT cold, but it was below freezing, and that’s all it takes, in Texas.
The charges that wind turbines froze, were bogus. Forty % of power is natural gas; 18% from coal; 11% nuclear; Wind power was under 30%—more like 27%. “No single fuel source can be blamed for this event.” Neil Chatterjee, the head commissioner of the energy commission.
The lesson is that the entire system has to be prepared for severe weather conditions. “Clearly, they have got to winterize everything.” The coal, nuclear, natural gas could have been winterized. “Climate change is having a dramatic change on weather.”
To me, it seems as though—just as Trump’s time in office revealed the true frailty of the U.S. in so many areas and destroyed our image abroad—this Texas freeze has revealed Texas’ image under Republican Governor Abbott as being full of holes. Texans like to think of themselves as hardy and “can do” types (just like Americans, in general, come to think of it). Well, we can do as long as we have power and water. When we have no water, things become dire fast.
To me—especially in light of our complete and total inability to secure Covid-19 shots here, either—I feel like YOYO is the prevailing Texan and U.S. philosophy, these days. What do I mean?
Trump: “The Democrats used the pandemic as an excuse to change all of the election rules without the approval of their state legislatures, therefore making it illegal.” The “change” to election rules was to allow more voters to use absentee ballots, since there was real risk from voting in person during a pandemic that has killed 500,000 citizens. The Constitution leaves the matter of how elections are conducted to state legislatures.
According to ERCOT’s Fuel Mix report, the state’s largest energy source last year was natural gas as 46% of the state’s energy needs. Wind supplied 23% and, if properly weatherized as experts had warned the blades should be, these fixtures continue working in sub-freezing temperatures. Coal supplied 18% of the state’s power, nuclear 11% and solar only 2%.
