By the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board
January 9, 2023
When a polar vortex descended toward Texas days before Christmas, Christine DeLisle was on edge. As mayor of Leander, a hilly city of 67,000 just north of Austin, DeLisle knew that her constituents’ warmth through several days of freezing temperatures would be largely dependent on the sketchy reliability of Atmos Energy, the city’s natural gas provider.
Two years prior, when Winter Storm Uri knocked out power for millions of Texans, Atmos cut off the gas supply for an entire subdivision in Leander, leaving more than 1,600 homes without heat for nearly a week. At a City Council meeting immediately afterwards, Atmos representatives apologized and gave the typical mea culpas, assuring such an outage would never happen again.
Then, three weeks ago, it happened again.
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