A lot of misinformation here on this thread speaking out of sheer ignorance. The freeze in Texas is not a "hundred year" weather phenomena, last time it happened was in 2011. Extreme weather patterns in general have been more and more frequent, Houston alone has experienced "hundred year" floods repeatedly in the last 10 years.
The damage done by the freeze has nothing to do with the people "not knowing how to handle cold". There is no infrastructure to deal with snow and ice, not a single snow plow or salt truck. The very same day snow falls in the northeast, major roads are cleared by plow and salt trucks, that doesn't exist in Texas.
The heating systems used in homes in Texas predominately use electricity as power vs. other parts where other fuel types are more common. This sky rocketed the demand.
The power companies in Texas have been warned after similar energy crisis in1989, again in 2011 to winterize the generation assets and fuel supply, but they chose money over lives. Natural gas lines froze, cooling loops in power plants froze, and planned generation capacity was down almost 50% vs. planned.
Texas is also the only state with a power grid isolated from the rest of the country, this was a deliberate attempt to circumvent federal regulation so there is no redundancy or flexibility in times of crisis.
After decades of policy of deregulation and greed, all these factors combined led to state wide blackouts and water outage that saw families entire neighborhoods without power and heat for 60+ hours. People froze to death in their homes, other people got CO poisoning from being desperate enough to burn fuel inside their homes.
