Snow in San Antonio is incredibly rare.

The last time we had a significant snowfall was 1985 and that was 13 inches, so 36 years

ago.

So we were expecting about maybe 3 to 3 inches on Sunday.

We ended up getting about 4 inches by about 1 or 2 in the morning and people were on social

media, they were sharing pictures, it was really cool, but things started to get really

bad.

My name is Joey Palacios and I'm the local government reporter for Texas Public Radio in San Antonio.

So early Monday morning as the snow was falling around 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning, things

started to get really bad because power started going out across the state.

You know how we tell people to do things to winterize their homes, protect their pipes,

so on?

Well, the reason we're in this situation are power plants were not winterized for this

type of storm.

Sunday night some of the equipment and infrastructure that helps transmit all the power literally

froze over and stopped working.

It left our power supply about 34,000 megawatts short.

So right around that time, Urkha, the manager of the state's power grid, started to issue

emergency orders to utilities across the state asking people to do rolling blackouts.

Because if they hadn't in that moment, the state's energy grid could have been lost.

So to offset some of the power consumption, they had to go to the utilities, do these

rolling blackouts just to put some kind of relief on the state's energy grid.

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