To start, this has little if not nothing to do with Ercot and all the stuff that's been brought up repeatedly since the freak winter storm (which I also went through), we aren't low on light juice, no rolling brown outs, etc.
Onto the the important points, a few things I've seen posted in comments here stuck out to me as being inaccurate:
>> No outage tracker available
No, we don't have a "down to the house" level outage tracker but that's not unreasonable given the large number of circuit level outages. That said we have had the following:
- Published sometime Monday and updated every 5 minutes: https://gisoutagetracker.azurewebsites.net/
- A much more detailed map that shows the status of things down to the circuit level: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/195bcf03ae0c491f9f14bf7...
>> It was just a small category 1, how could it be so bad?
As an outsider, I'd probably be asking the same thing but there were a few things that made this situation worse than it would normally be.
- Lack of preparedness
But not in the way you're probably thinking. Our forecasted tracks when it was coming off the Yucatan started out with this thing staying well South of the Houston area. As of July 6th, 2 days before landfall, it was confidently projected to make landfall around Corpus Christ and Houston would just get a bunch of rain. But that's not what happened, It ended up being a worst case track with the eye going right up the west side of Houston putting the entire city under the "Dirty side" of the storm.
- It's been wet AF the last month!
We probably got lucky that the week before the storm it finally stopped raining for a while. I bring this up because just in my neighborhood alone, I saw at least 5 old and very very large trees that fell and had huge chunks of root system pulled up out of the ground. These are trees that have survived at least 2 major hurricanes in the past that just popped out of the ground and laid over. I suspect, especially in the suburbs on the North and West side, that a bunch of harder to get to lines were damaged which, in my mind, helps explain why there are a ton more complete circuit outages (No traffic lights, major buildings like grocery stores completely disconnected) in our areas.
All that said, it sucks and is uncomfortable but on the bright side, this time last year we were in the middle of a month long heatwave (hitting 100°F+ almost daily) but since the storm blew through it stayed relatively mild and even fairly pleasant. It was actually really nice out just chilling under a pop up tent yesterday afternoon!
Hope this helps give some insight into things from a first person perspective.