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What Texans Can Learn from The UK Big Freeze
Will Texas experience another energy grid collapse? Maybe not.
On 17 December 2009, it started snowing across Britain. It didn’t let up through that month or the next and on 5 January 2010, the temperature plummeted to −17.6 °C (0.3 °F) in Manchester, northwest England. It was the coldest winter since the late 1970s and became known as the Big Freeze.
At the time, I was project manager for a construction company that worked on behalf of some of the UK’s biggest insurers. The 2007 Humber floods, I was there. The Oldham gas explosion of 2012, same. Whenever a homeowner made an insurance claim, we got the call. It was our job to assess the damage and complete the repairs.
In 2010, we faced a new challenge. It seemed like every header tank in the northwest gave up the ghost. For those who don’t know, British homes are heated by hot water. Header tanks are large tanks of water used to fill older heating systems and accommodate water expansion. They’re placed in attics and have a capacity of about 22–55 gallons (100–250 litres).
What we learned the hard way was that the attics and pipes in a lot of older houses weren’t properly insulated. In 2010, faced with a prolonged period of extreme cold, the water in those pipes froze. The moment the Big Freeze retreated, hundreds of litres of water came…
