WHILE CITY FROZE, 170 PUB MWS SAT UNUSED

 (Ed.'s note: Just this Wednesday Mayor Trey Mendez said that the hurricane dome at the north Sports Park will be open as a "warming" center and a place to charge electronic devices. This came on the third  day that residents have gone without heat or lights. As usual, PUB CEO John Bruciak pleaded with residents to be "patient" and to cut back on energy usage. WTF?)

Special to El Rrun-Rrun

Juan Mendoza - not his name - was desperate when the lights went out and the house started to get cold.

But that was the least of his problems. His mom's oxygen machine lacked power, too. So he jerry rigged it so that he could power the oxygen mask through power derived from his car's battery using jumper cables with the car turned on.

"It's probably not recommended," he said. "But she needs it and as long as it works and she can breathe that's all I need."

Across town, in a trailer park off Maverick Road, Jose Luna (also not his real name) gathered his family in a central room and shut it off from the rest of the trailer. In the two days without electricity, the mobile home had grown as cold as an icebox, he said.

"We took turns going to warm up in the truck and then went to sleep together," he said. "It was tempting to burn wood in a tub inside, but it is very dangerous."

Neither Mendoza nor Luna may have known it, but their utility, Brownsville Public Utility Board, had 170 MWS of power (136 operating and 34 backup MWs) at its disposal, but for reasons so far unexplained, let it sit idle while the city and residents froze in darkness. For the elderly and those hooked up to medical devices that require electricity, it was a life and death necessity.

Today, after two days of killing cold and "rolling" outages, PUB CEO John Bruciak said that the Silas Ray plant has just "now"  been activated.

Why hadn't it been before? And if it is "now" on, does the photo above with no steam emanating from the stacks belie his assertion? This triggered memes from some sarcastic social media pundits such as the one at right.

"You know how much 170 MWS is?," said a city worker. "We could have provided electricity to San Benito and Harlingen easy. People were suffering and in danger of dying and the plant was never activated. This is gross negligence from PUB. It's a crime."

A city commissioner said that because PUB is a member of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) it had to be told by the Austin-based Council when it was allowed to activate the Silas Ray plant.

The problem, says a former PUB board member is that PUB executives never asked.

"Bruciak lives in South Padre Island and he could care less about what's going on in the barrios and neighborhoods in Brownsville. Another one of the top three CEOs commutes to San Antonio. What do they care?"

To get an idea of the 170 MWs, just think about this. PUB and its ratepayers were going to shell out some $500 million to build a 800 MW plant with Tenaska. Of those 800 MWs, the city would own 200 MWs, just 30 MWs less than what Silas Ray produces at peak production. And we already have it available.

Some elected officials say that PUB's membership in ERCOT ties its hands and its ability to use the plant. If that's true, said State Rep. Alex Dominguez, then Brownsville should have some say on whether to activate its plant, which since it's almost never used,  probably should not be counted during the rotating blackouts.

"We're putting together a series of questions for ERCOT in Austin," he said. "Local utilities like PUB who have ownership of a plant like Silas Ray whould be given leeway to provide electricity to its residents. They own it."

But regardless of the discussions in Austin, Brownsville elected officials should be asking Bruciak and his cadre of executives why they did not plan for the frigid cold that they knew was coming and have a plan in place to provide life-sustaining power to Brownsville homes. 

After all, whose plant is it?