After Austin officials fumbled warnings about a persistent power crisis that could leave tens of thousands of people in the dark for more than three days, Mayor Kirk Watson admitted a need to overhaul the city’s emergency communications.
[Austin makes progress restoring power, but tens of thousands still without]
But critics and residents — many still raw from the statewide power outages in 2021 — had little room for forgiveness as this week’s ice storm proved an early test of Watson’s administration just weeks after he took office. In fact, many of the missteps this week suggest little was learned about emergency communications in the past two years. A city report from November 2021 reviewing that response then hammered Austin’s lack of planning, but particularly its history of lackluster communication skills during an emergency event.
