Rolling Blackouts in Texas

The weather was absolutely horrible today across the state of Texas. It was even worse because of the rolling blackouts and yet I still had to go (and stay at) school.

I had to back up so far to get the entire building in!

This is a view of my school from behind a Bridgeland lake.

This is the entire campus, including the middle and elementary school that are right next to my school.

This is my school. It's really new, actually; it was built in 2008, and this is the first year that they have a senior class. They implemented each grade year by year, starting with freshmen and sophomores. The inside of it is also very pretty. I was originally going to do a post on just my school, but that's far less interesting than what happened today. You can tell I took these pictures yesterday because today was a lot colder, a lot cloudier and a lot less bright.

Today was perhaps the coldest, worst and weirdest day I've had in Texas so far. Yesterday there were some brief power outages, but that was only a precursor to a worse incident: the rolling blackouts implemented all over the state of Texas. (http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/50488/) Because of the freakishly cold weather up around Dallas, more energy is being used, and so there was a massive energy shortage... the state of Texas declared it an energy crisis and proceeded to cut off the energy periodically in all of the communities, except for necessary buildings such as hospitals and the like.

I discovered all of this on the bus... I went to the bus, as per usual, and I was not late... but the bus was. I got on the bus and what do you know, the bus driver was so worried. The first thing she said is, "Your neighborhood is the first I've seen that has power!" All over the city, community and state, people were out of power. Apparently, our particular street (because it is so new and so far from established and settled streets) is on a different energy grid. From the radio, we [the other kid at my stop, the bus driver and myself] learn that our school has no power, but classes will continue as usual. Fantastic, right?

When the bus arrived at school, all seemed normal, but 45 minutes later, the power went out. This cycle continued all day. Every forty-five minutes, the power would go out, and stay out for about the length of a class period. Essentially, every other class, we sat in darkness. It was not the most fun day. It was cold, and dark and pointless because no real work was really done in class.

I hope that the power is back on full-time for tomorrow, but the rolling blackouts could last until Friday. On top of that, there could be snow tomorrow night (in Houston, Texas), meaning that school could be cancelled on Friday...

Who would have guessed it would be so cold in Texas?

--Lauren