No Kid Hungry Texas program director, Stacie Sanchez Hare, shares the drama of surviving winter storm Uri and the power crisis that followed earlier this year. Her team overcame major challenges and stepped up to support families affected by the storm.
Stacie's son playing in the snow
There’s a famous Texas saying that goes like this, ‘if you don’t like the weather in Texas, just wait five minutes,’ and that has never felt truer than it did the second week of February.
I am a proud native South Texan and I lived in the northeast for 15 years so I’ve experienced a winter storm, polar vortex, and my personal favorite, thundersnow. I share all this to say that the extreme weather Texans endured in February was a perfect storm of cascading disasters due to the ongoing pandemic.
This was not just a winter storm. 58 Texans died, mostly from hypothermia and also from carbon monoxide poisoning due to people trying to stay warm in their cars, car accidents as people tried to drive to safety on snowy roads, and medical equipment failure due to a loss of power.
Among the victims was 11-year-old Cristian Pavón; the new Houstonian arrived from Honduras in 2019 after over a year of separation from his mother. The family was living without power and heat for over 24 hours when the temperature was nine degrees outside.
Cristian died of hypothermia; he froze to death in his sleep.
There is a haunting picture of Cristian playing in the snow for the first time the day before his death that I look at every day as I think about my own four-year-old son playing in the snow on that same day. As a mom and human being, the horrific loss of your child and the intense grief that family will experience every day for the rest of their lives is unconscionable.
Countless Texans were forced to choose between staying isolated to protect themselves from COVID-19 or break their pods to let friends and family come together for warmth and survival. My own family was very fortunate. We lost power and heat for 14 hours but the chilling effects of the storm went beyond the weather.
Unlike states who are accustomed to and prepared for winter weather, many of our cities lacked the basic infrastructure that I knew up north. There was no salting of the streets in advance or rumbling snow trucks during the storm. If you could get out to a grocery store, you were greeted by empty shelves and scrambling employees.
When I went to bed on Monday night, I gathered up my family and we all slept together under a mountain of blankets and in wool pajamas. When I woke up on Tuesday morning, it was 45 degrees in my house and it was a struggle to leave our warm cocoon.
My husband and I opened our home to my mom and a couple of neighbors who lost power. I would find out a week later that one of our guests tested positive for COVID-19. Thankfully, everyone else in our home was fully or partially vaccinated with the exception of my son.
If I was faced with the same decision, I wouldn’t change anything, and it illustrates the very real and tough decisions Texans were grappling with.
Two million homes and businesses were without power across Texas. That number continued to go up as temperatures went down. At the peak of the storm, there were more than 4.1 million outages being reported. More than 3 million remained without power after the first day of the storm. The financial cost of the storm is projected to cost over $200B, not accounting for the irreplaceable loss of human lives.
As our team slowly emerged on an unsettlingly warmer Friday morning, we jumped into action.
No Kid Hungry Texas provided a $20,000 emergency grant to Feeding Texas, the umbrella organization for food banks in the state of Texas. We amplified the messages about Replacement SNAP for people who lost food due to power outages from the storm and the Meal Map Finder/Texting Hotline (text 304-304 and enter “food” or “comida”) for people seeking free meals.
The team utilized our social media channels, the 3XDope Podcast, and local press coverage to spread this message far and wide. We engaged local elected officials to share resources with their constituents and the team is in the process of completing emergency grants to two school districts in the Rio Grande Valley. Lastly, our team rolled up our sleeves and volunteered at the San Antonio Food Bank to package food for Texans in need.
The compounded trauma of living through a deadly storm in the time of a global pandemic is an experience that we will never forget. If my time in isolation has taught me anything, it is that humility and gratitude will keep you grounded during tough times. This experience has galvanized our team to work relentlessly in partnership with our communities who are steeped in local expertise about how to best serve their communities.
I continue to think about Cristian and his family every day and I hug Patricio just a few seconds longer for all the moms who can’t. Every day we get a new chance to decide how we’re going to show up and I’m proud to work beside people who give their best every day in service of ending childhood hunger.
