This February marked the third straight year in which many Texans were iced in for at least three days. Students lost several days of school, a lot of businesses closed, and the roads were a mess.
What can the state do to better prepare if this trend continues and why has it stayed so cold for so long three years in a row?
"It depends on the temperature, of course, the road surface temperatures, the track of the upper-level low, and also how much precipitation are we going to have," KRLD Chief Meteorologist Dan Brounoff said. "And the most important thing besides the temperatures, is how fast is the upper-level low moving? Is it going to cruise across in 24 hours and we're done? Or does it stall to our west as the storm system did at the end of January and early February?"
As city and county governments prepared for this year's ice event, the timing of the storm created some problems in its early hours.
"The trickiest part of this last winter weather storm was, if you recall, it wasn't forecast to occur until Monday afternoon. And I'm walking out to my work truck at 6 a.m. and there's ice," Denton County Emergency Management Director Eric Hutmacher said. "OK, well, we had a 3:40 a.m. phone call where the forecast was still on track. And then we fast forward to 6 a.m. and actually the ice hit Tarrant, Parker, and Denton Counties, right about 6 a.m."
Rena Honea, the president of Alliance AFT, said for students, it's not just days lost in the classroom, but the disruption of routine. Then why not utilize the remote learning tools developed during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic?
"People are just exhausted and they need that time to recoup, although it wasn't planned," she said. "I know for educators that I talked to, they were like, I am so grateful to have some time to just be able to relax."
In addition to the school and business closures across the state, the Austin area experienced major power outages that last for days when trees and power lines fell under the added weight of the ice.
"It's impractical, theoretically impractical, to make the infrastructure fail-safe, but we have to make them safe to fail," associate professor civil and environmental engineering at Texas A&M Ali Mostafavi said. "By safe to fail, we mean we have to have a level of disruption that's tolerable for the community that could be restored within a reasonable amount of time."
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