The frigid temperatures and icy weather we had across Texas a few weeks back brought forward visceral memories of the 2021 winter storm for many.
In the 2021 storm, the power went out for millions. Pipes froze, water was unavailable, hundreds died.
Still, it could have been worse. The power grid that provides electricity to most of Texas was just over four and a half minutes away from complete failure.
The new novel, “Dark Texas,” imagines what might have happened if it did fail.
It’s the debut novel of Charles J. Petrie Jr. He joined the Standard for a discussion. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: I mentioned this is your first novel. Why was “Dark Texas” the story you wanted to write?
You know, I’m an academic. Now, I’ve never written fiction before.
But I ended up writing this novel for the same reason that I’ve written most of my academic papers and books, because there was subject matter that I thought had not been well-treated. And I was annoyed. I said, “I got to do something here.”
I know you’ve lived all over the country, all over the world, really. Were you in Texas in February 2021?
Yes, I was. I am fortunate, like the protagonist in the novel, to be living off-grid.
I built myself a little off-grid place in the woods between Elgin and Bastrop. I had heat because I have a wood stove. I produced my own power. My water was frozen, but I had jugs of water. I was only mildly inconvenienced.
But listening to the radio, it was quite dramatic. I found a few articles that said, oh, it could have been much worse. And they tried to describe how much worse it could be. And I read the articles. And I decided that they failed.
It could be much worse.
Not only could it be much worse, but then I started researching into the grid itself, into the infrastructure. Suppose it had failed. How long would it be before it came back up? Power plants can’t just restart on their own.
So if the power plants had gone down, which is what the grid collapsing would have been, each plant has to restart carefully. They have to connect carefully. It takes a long time for everything to put the grid back together.
Each power plant requires what’s called a black start generator. There are only about 29 or 30 of them in the whole state. Well, it turns out most of them, over 80 percent, were inoperable.
Well, the power plants that run on gas wouldn’t work because one of the reasons the grid would have gone down is because the gas supply was cut off for various reasons. Alright so you’ve got to depend upon a coal plant. Well, one third of the coal plants were down because their coal pile froze.
I was looking at all that and the more I looked into it, it got worse and worse and worse.
The first thing you’ve got to consider are the hospitals. If the grid had gone down in the summer, these hospitals have backup generators with five days of fuel and the National Guard can deliver more fuel to them. That’s fine for air conditioning. But most of these heat pumps that they have are too small to heat the whole hospital. And if they tried to heat whole hospital, they run out of fuel very quickly.
You also have to evacuate all the nursing homes. And if people can’t go to the grocery store and get food, if they have no heat in their house, and there’s not going to be any heat until it gets warm again outside, which is going to be more than a week and it’s really freezing cold, solution is to leave. For a lot of Texans, that’s quite a challenge.
In my book, which is a plausible worst-case scenario, Louisiana and Oklahoma put their state troopers on the bridges with shotguns and say, “thou shalt not pass,” just like they did in Gretna in New Orleans during Katrina.
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You mentioned you come from an academic background – really, a scientific background. You were an associate professor and senior research scientist at Stanford for a long time.
How did that inform your work?
I did a lot of work in what’s called planning and even disaster planning, so that helped.
So when you do that work and you write software that tries to explore, well, “this has happened, what do we do?”… The more I did that, in this case, the more I found that there wasn’t a lot that could be done. The situation is just too big and too drastic.
There are all kinds of things I just kept finding as I was sort of imitating one of my disaster planning software packages.
You mentioned your character Mac, who I assumed, looking at this, that you put a lot of yourself in there. Another one of your characters is the parent of a young child, and we know extreme weather can really affect the most vulnerable, the worst.
Can you talk about exploring that?
They’re going to die. I mentioned nursing homes. If you move people out of a nursing home, what I’ve read is that roughly half of them will die just from the move. They’re too frail. And you’re moving them in really bad circumstances.
If you’ve got a small child at home, and your home is freezing, child won’t do well. Grown adults will freeze. You mentioned a couple hundred people died. That’s the official estimate. You surely have seen the reports that say, well, we think it was more than that.
That’s why I wrote the book, is because I wanted people to appreciate what a catastrophe this would be.
I mean, I was going to set you up for that because this is a grim story in a lot of ways, but it’s not a far-flung apocalypse. As we know, we were four minutes and 37 seconds from it.
What are you hoping to add to this conversation?
You know, what I would love to see, and I don’t know, I would like for this book to start a discussion among experts and for them to draw conclusions about is our grid now reliable?
And if it isn’t reliable, what needs to be fixed? Because we can’t have this danger looming over our heads.
» RELATED: Here’s how Texans can stay prepared for winter storms and other disasters
There’s another sort of theme in your book about preparedness and about awareness and your characters have different levels of that. What’s your message, I guess, for just the everyday Texan? I mean, it feels like there’s gotta be a line between sort of panic and preparedness.
There’s no way to prepare for the whole grid collapsing unless you take extraordinary measures.
But for normal stuff, backup generators are cheap. Buy one, know how it works, and have it available to at least run your refrigerator and your cell phones.
Have a source of heat. Figure out what are you going to do if it gets really cold and you have to heat your house.
Gasoline or diesel or whatever fuel that your car uses, if it runs on fossil fuel, if you have an electric vehicle, have it charged up as much as possible. Keep as much fuel in your vehicles as possible. Give yourself an out.
