More than 400,000 people in Texas lost power last week due to the deadly ice storm that swept the Southern Plains and Southeast.

Tens of thousands of Texans are still without power, officially surpassing the three days many of them lost power during the outages of 2021 — and Austin city officials are now saying that some 30,000 homes and businesses might not get their electricity back for another week. This is a huge deal for people who need to go to work, cook food, and generally function like a person living in the year 2023.

Unlike the power outages of 2021, these outages have reportedly not been caused by a lack of power on the power grid, but rather by infrastructure and downed wires. They were also, just to be clear, not caused by drag queens or trans kids or abortion or white kids being told that racism exists or anything else high up on the Republican Party's list of immediate concerns.

So far, there have been seven deaths reported from the ice storm, but we probably won't know the full toll until much later. The 2021 outage led to the deaths of more than 100 people.

Things have gotten so bad over in Gov. Greg Abbott's Texas that people were mass dumpster diving this weekend in the parking lot of an Austin H-E-B grocery store that had to throw out a ton of refrigerated food due to the power loss. Someone took notice and posted on social media that there was free food in their dumpster, and more than 250 people showed up to claim some for themselves.

"This is not free food!" Travis County Constable George Morales III said in a post on Facebook. "We had over 250 people fighting in the dumpsters because someone posted 'Free Food!' The food is rotten and spoiled, and is unsafe to eat. Our deputies and APD responded to roads that were gridlocked because of this false post. The area was cleared by our office. If you know someone that got food, let them know it is not safe."

Morales later clarified that he did not mean people were physically fighting each other, as several news outlets ended up reporting, but that they were fighting to grab the free food for themselves. Still, this certainly says a lot about how the state is taking care of its residents during this difficult time. Perhaps instead of spending so much time trying to throw people in prison for taking abortion pills, the state government could start working on having better infrastructure and emergency protocols so this kind of thing doesn't happen. Texas has more power outages than any other state, so one would think this would be at least some kind of priority.

An H-E-B spokesperson explained that the reason they tossed the food and didn't give it to a food bank was that “the store was unable to keep certain perishable foods at proper temperatures. To adhere to strict food quality and safety standards, we are required to dispose of certain perishable foods when they are not properly temperature controlled, which also prevents us from donating the items to food pantries and food banks.”

That being said, given the freezing temperatures in the state this weekend, much of the food was probably fine, at least the food that wasn't raw meat.

Wonkette is independent and fully funded by readers like you. Click below to tip us!

How often would you like to donate?

Just once Monthly

Select an amount (USD)

$2$25$5$50$10$100$15$500$20$1000