The quality or wealth of your neighborhood had little impact. The abrupt nature of the unplanned plant shutdowns meant that brownouts/blackouts were did not give preferential treatment to certain neighborhoods.

I was in Corpus for the winter freeze, and never lost power despite no medical facilities or fire services on my service branch… just luck that none of my friends, family or coworkers shared.

The winter failure was most impactful because of poorly prepared emergency procedures and shit communication to residents. It was exacerbated by homes and residents unprepared for hard multi-day freezes. I was running around Corpus delivering gallon bags of hot water and towels in the middle of the night to help people avoid their water supply cutoff pipes from freezing - because for some reason 3 ft of exposed copper pipe is normal there! Same flaw in my new RGV home.

The solution is not simply ‘upgrade the grid’ but rather to eject the penny pinchers and prioritize quality risk analysis based solutions to direct spending where it has the greatest impact.