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1. In 1888, a disastrous blizzard hit the east coast. It claimed 400 lives, sank 200 ships, and paralyzed cities for days. And if you want to understand what’s going on in Texas, it’s a good place to start: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/blizzards-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-mayor/384833/
2. Cities offered their residents the benefits of density, and all the new technological conveniences of modern life. But the blizzard revealed that the very things that generally made cities safer, made them more vulnerable in disasters. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/blizzards-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-mayor/384833/
3. One response to the disaster of 1888 was the hardening of infrastructure. Streetcars went underground and became subways. Power and phone lines were run through conduits. If we couldn’t afford this infrastructure failing, we needed to invest it making it more robust.
4. New York Mayor Abram Hewitt did what his predecessors had done when it snowed—largely holed up at his palatial Lexington Avenue home, and encouraged people to shovel themselves out. Blizzards were private problems, he thought, not crises for government to deal with.
5. But when the reliability of collective infrastructure becomes a matter of life or death, people expect their leaders to keep it functioning in a crisis. And that’s the second change from 1888—a lesson a certain Texas senator might have usefully learned: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/blizzards-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-mayor/384833/
