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Comment by theultdev | Hacker News Reader

uhm, a hurricane hit.

Yes, but only a Cat 1.

IN the city. With sustained high winds for hours. And Houston has LOTS of big trees next to power lines.

but the wind was crazy. rain only lasted but a few hours. but that wind was pretty intense. a lot more so then anything iv experienced

Cat 1 is up to 90 mph wind. That's not nothing.

We’d expect some power outage but when Category 1 hurricanes hit Florida, power is back on in 1-3 days. This knocked out 85% of Houston’s power and will take weeks for many customers to get A/C back on. Excess deaths are rising fast, and I know of many pets which have died already. Category 1 hurricanes aren’t supposed to cause this much damage. Most likely, Centerpoint skimped on tree maintenance, which led to excessively large damage.

If only they'd had literal decades to build up hardened infrastructure. Alas, ..

Their population doubled in size over the last quarter century. Maybe that has something to do with it.

So half their infrastructure is less than 25 years old and it still wasn't built up to snuff?

True, but it doesn’t seem that’s the issue. 60% of lines are buried but it’s mostly the newer developments paid for by the land developers: https://houstonlanding.org/to-bury-or-not-to-bury-how-can-ce...

That said, I’d expect to be able to see this effect on the outage maps and I don’t, at least from an eyeball perspective.

Anecdotally, plenty of areas with buried lines have outages still.

It doesn’t seem that’s the issue. 60% of lines are buried but it’s mostly the newer developments paid for by the land developers: https://houstonlanding.org/to-bury-or-not-to-bury-how-can-ce...

That said, I’d expect to be able to see this effect on the outage maps and I don’t.

So what you're saying is they scaled too fast?

"Well a wave hit it!"

Is that unusual?

oh yeah. At sea? Chance in a million!

sure. and a hurricane will probably hit every few years at this rate of global warming. You realize texas is right by the gulf of mexico, and the trend is stronger and stronger hurricanes every year?

Next you’ll tell me we couldn’t foresee this…

regularly trimming all trees around power lines, slowly moving toward underground power lines, etc is the way to go.

Hurricanes are not increasing in frequency.

And is this your same advice for California?

Everyone needs to bury their lines but it costs money.

Cali every year has to have controlled blackouts because it's so bad at managing lines, no hurricanes needed.

“not increasing in frequency” - is this a hoax then?

https://climatemodeling.science.energy.gov/news/more-frequen...

And yes California is another state with a poor grid. 100%. On the bright side i see some action being taken to improve things: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/california-puc-power-line-u...

yes it is a hoax, NOAA tracks this and they haven't found any significant increase:

https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/

> There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricane frequency (after adjusting for changing observing capabilities over time), there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity.

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