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rain_gryphonGot my mom fully vaccinated today. There's that taken care of.
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El Paso's power generation uses coal. They're sitting warm and happy, in the midst of the disaster.
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El Paso's power generation uses coal. They're sitting warm and happy, in the midst of the disaster.
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Date: 2021-02-19 10:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-19 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-19 05:45 pm (UTC)That coal plant didn't do El Paso much good in '12, I think it was. We had a -19f system settle in the region for 3 days: just cold, no snow or wind. They were getting power from Mexico until the system moved south and Mexico said we gotta have it for our own people.
It was interesting seeing dead palm trees: the sudden cold burst the internal structure of the trees!
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Date: 2021-02-19 07:16 pm (UTC)Ack! Good luck on that!
They seem to have addressed whatever the weakness was (probably uninsulated pipes/cooling towers) since then. The natural gas network and power plants, are I /think/, new since 2012. I'm sure they'll be fixed up by the next cold snap. The offline storage battery buildings will presumably be easily fixed by insulation and perhaps heating. The windmills, however - those are exposed to the weather by design. I see no way of fixing those short of a thorough redesign and rebuild.
the sudden cold burst the internal structure of the trees!
Srsly? I know they're not really evolved to live in the cold, but bursting is a pretty extreme failure mode.
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Date: 2021-02-19 08:44 pm (UTC)Internal cells contain water, water expands when frozen, cells burst. Structure fails. You'd see palm trees literally folded over double.
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Date: 2021-02-19 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-02-19 09:39 pm (UTC)All of the trees near my house had no problem with that -19. There must be something fundamentally different about how palms evolving in a desert environment that makes them vulnerable to prolonged deep freeze. I know their structure is fundamentally different than say, a pine tree, because you don't see them cut down for commercial wood like a pine tree. And maybe it was a specific type of palm that we were seeing dead and some species survived. What we saw dead were the tall, willowy 'blowing in the breeze' sort. In Phoenix, we have those, and also the 'six feet in diameter at the base and 40' tall' which may well be resistant to deep prolonged freezes.
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Date: 2021-02-19 10:50 pm (UTC)Yeah, you've got a point there.