Austin Woman’s Power Goes Out Due To Winter Storm While She's Out Of Her House. Now She Can’t Get Back In

An Austin TikToker got an unexpected scare ahead of the winter storm expected for the area over the weekend. The worry stemmed from a brief power outage that left her locked out of her home after a quick trip to the neighborhood coffee shop.

The viral clip from creator Dana (@dana_does_it) has been viewed more than 107,000 times and opens with her on her front porch, pondering her options after receiving a text from Austin Energy about a power outage in her area. Because Dana had left her home through her garage and had her front door deadbolt locked, there was no option for her to re-enter the house until power was restored.

“The power is already out here, so God, can't wait to see what happens tonight and tomorrow,” she says in the video that was posted on Friday morning, more than a day ahead of the arrival of freezing temperatures and expected ice accumulation that posed a threat to power lines.

“While I was out, the power went out, and the predicament that I'm in right now is that I left through my garage, and since I can't open the garage door with my remote because the power is out, I can't get into the house because the front door is deadbolted," she explains.

The dilemma ended undramatically, with the power returning suddenly after Dana tried to pry loose the garage door and several side doors and windows. Commenters were still bought in, however.

“An elder millennial would have already gotten in through a window by the time the power came back on,” one of them noted.

Another commenter, in a nod to power and infrastructure failures that have troubled Austin in recent years, added, “I fear you & the power company have already failed the test that hasn’t started yet.”

Winter Weather Revisited

All the power grid-related concerns trace back to the larger statewide failure in early 2021, when Winter Storm Uri left almost all of Austin and massive swaths of the state in the dark for several days amid single-digit temperatures. That failure was pinned on insufficient preparation by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which had to conduct rolling blackouts or risk massive, long-term failures of the power generation system across the entire state.

In Austin, the blackouts were worsened by bursting frozen water lines and other utility outages that lasted for close to a week, creating long-term trauma for the area as a whole. And an early 2023 freeze caked the area with ice, downing power lines and trees throughout the city, with some neighborhoods taking more than a week to have their power restored.

Dana's worry at the beginning of the video is a nod to the deep drop in temperatures forecast for the Austin area over the weekend, which was part of a much larger system that created extreme freezing conditions across much of the country. Given the distrust of ERCOT and state and local officials in general, her attitude was emblematic of many awesome nights heading into the weekend.

The Re-Entry Problem

The problem with her garage door is fairly obvious since anything motorized would be useless without energy. We are left to presume that it was functioning normally once the power returned, but suppliers and installers of garage door equipment note that there can be lingering effects from an outage.

Any power surge that may occur after power is restored could damage components in the garage door motor, and the safety mechanisms that kick in during an outage could remain engaged, leaving the unit inoperable. Newer homes, or newer garage doors, tend to include a backup battery as part of the system to prevent the kinds of problems seen in the video.

Several commenters questioned why Dana couldn’t use her house key to reenter the home. They’d missed her mention that the deadbolt on her front door was still locked from the inside since she’d exited the home from the garage. Single-cylinder deadbolts that lock with a thumb-turn mechanism from inside a home are quite common and are seen as a way to provide reliable security without an extra key. This setup is seen as much more preferable to key-only deadbolts, which can only be locked from the inside with a key and can make an emergency exit difficult.

While there was plenty of advice from viewers on how Dana could make the house easier to enter while still keeping it safe, she noted that she was a few days from moving and that her main priority was packing her belongings or giving away items she wasn’t interested in moving.

@dana_does_it

Patch reached out to Dana via email and direct message. We’ll update this if they respond.