February 2022 Winter Storm Random Thoughts

As the snow falls in its heaviest amounts, I am keeping fingers crossed that we will avoid the widespread and long power outages of last year. Of course, it seems backwards that Republican leadership will be able to claim success for their "reforms" even though they didn't do anything to strengthen the grid. I've been thinking about how bad weather events reveal the weaknesses of Dallas and car-centric cities. 

The first and biggest way that having more people living in Dallas will help is that it's way more efficient to have people living close together than sprawled in the suburbs. This is because single family homes consume way more energy. All of that energy needed to heat homes is the primary strain on the grid during a winter storm or intense heat during the summer. 

The second way is that a more dense city is a more walkable one. The days leading up to the storm saw people rushing to the grocery store in order to get food for a few days. They knew that they wouldn't be able to get into their cars for a few days and needed to stock up. But if you could walk to a grocery store, you wouldn't feel so threatened by bad weather. A more walkable city also means it's easier for people to walk somewhere warm if their power does go out. Finally, a more dense neighborhood has been found to result in lower death rates during extreme weather because there are more social connections in more dense neighborhoods. This was one of the more interesting findings to come out of a book about the Chicago heat wave of 1995: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/443213in.html. 

Finally, having greater density would allow for more power lines to be buried, reducing the risk of outages from downed trees. The reason for this is that burying power lines is expensive, and it is not feasible in single-family neighborhoods except for the wealthiest areas. This is one reason why poorer neighborhoods tend to lose power more often, and it's a weakness that will only get worse in Dallas as we experience more extreme weather events. 

I'm sure there are other reasons I missed, but those are the ones that come to mind as I try to be productive on my snow day off from school! 

-Adam Lamont