Billy the Storm, or how anything can be politically weaponized
On October the 26th, there was an Ice storm in Oklahoma City. There is always a storm in Oklahoma City (OKC), neither the only energy company, OG&E, nor my internet provider are all that great, so it’s normal to have to give up on work and just chill. In the beginning of the afternoon, however, the power went off and never came back on.
We left the house and drove around. The eerie scene had a tragic beauty to it: all the trees in the city were covered with a layer of ice which made them look like glass sculptures. They all had broken limbs, branches and sometimes even the whole trunk was sliced open. Several streets were blocked by broken tree material, front yards had piles of icy branches, roofs were damaged, and a few cars were covered with debris. On my backyard, a huge branch broken from our neighbor’s house had fallen to our side, snapping the powerline.
On the first day, the outage left over 300,000 residents without power. The outage affected, at some point, more than 400,000 residents. And then the nightmare made of outage, conflicting information from different OG&E departments and an epic failure to find a common interest battle…
