Why working from home failed when Texas froze
A year into the pandemic, many continuity plans answered every site outage with remote work. Winter Storm Uri removed power, water, roads and home connectivity together, showing that a single fallback fails when failures are correlated across people, sites, networks and suppliers.
Looking Back revisits one week at a time, from January 2020 to today, and asks what it meant for the banks, health systems and public agencies we serve. The series was written in 2026, with the benefit of hindsight, and each article says which week it looks back on.
The week
In mid-February 2021, an extreme cold wave settled over Texas and much of the central United States. On February 15, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which runs most of the state’s grid, ordered utilities to shed load as generation failed across gas, coal, nuclear and wind sources. Rotating outages meant to last short periods stretched into days, and millions of Texans lost power in freezing temperatures.
The effects cascaded. Water systems lost pressure as pipes froze and treatment plants lost power, and boil-water notices covered millions of people. Some hospitals struggled with water supply and heat. Roads were impassable in many areas, and mobile and home internet service failed where power was out. Hundreds of deaths were later attributed to the storm. The grid operator ended emergency conditions around February 19.
By February 2021, most organizations had spent eleven months proving that knowledge work could be done from home. Continuity plans had absorbed that experience: if the office is unavailable, people work remotely. Texas showed the limit of that assumption. When a regional grid fails, the office and the home fail together, along with the roads between them, the water in both and the networks that connect them. Remote work is a sound fallback for a building outage. It is a weak one for a regional event. The storm exposed four kinds of correlated dependency that single-fallback plans missed: people, facilities, communications and suppliers.
People: staff were affected, not available
Continuity plans tend to treat staff as a resource to be relocated. In Texas, staff were dealing with burst pipes, no heat, no water and, in some cases, danger to their families. Many could not work, and should not have been asked to.
For organizations with large regional teams, such as a bank’s operations center, a health system’s revenue cycle office or a state agency’s call center, that meant losing a whole function at once. Plans that held up had already spread critical roles across regions. Cross-trained staff in other states or time zones could take over work queues within hours, because they used the same systems and procedures. Follow-the-sun designs, often built for efficiency, turned out to be continuity designs.
Spreading roles has costs. Cross-training takes time from productive work, and duplicate teams in a second region raise payroll. A cheaper middle course is to identify the few queues that cannot wait, such as payment exceptions, claims with deadlines or benefit eligibility decisions, and build second-region coverage for those alone.
Duty of care comes first. In a regional disaster, the first operational task is to account for staff and their safety. Organizations that could reach employees by text, confirm their status and tell them plainly not to work were better placed to rebuild coverage than those that waited to see who logged in. A roll-call capability that works without the corporate network belongs in every plan.
Facilities: sites depend on more than electricity
Many critical sites have generators. Fewer had planned for days without municipal water, which some data center cooling systems and every hospital depend on. Fewer still had planned for fuel deliveries over closed roads, or for staff unable to reach the site for several shifts.
A practical exercise for each critical facility is a dependency table. It lists power, water, fuel, staff access, network carriers and key suppliers. For each, it estimates how long the site can run without it, alone and in combination. Generators address one row of that table. A regional event can empty several rows at once, and the shortest combined figure is the one that matters.
The table also shows where small investments pay off. Water storage, fuel delivery contracts with priority clauses, sleeping arrangements for essential staff, and a second network carrier with a different physical route are all modest expenses compared with losing the site.
Communications: the home network is part of the grid
Remote work depends on home broadband and mobile networks. Those depend on local power and, for mobile service, on tower batteries and generators that run for limited periods. As outages lengthened, connectivity failed for many people who still had charged laptops and the will to work.
Home connectivity cannot be assumed during regional events. Organizations should know which critical roles can be done from an alternate site with independent power and connectivity, and how staff would get there. They also need emergency communication channels that do not depend on corporate email, chat or identity systems being reachable, and staff who know in advance which channel to use.
Suppliers: your vendors share your weather
Organizations outside Texas were affected too. Vendors, outsourcers and service providers with operations or staff in the region faced the same constraints. A firm headquartered elsewhere could still lose a processor, a call center or a support team concentrated in the affected area.
Third-party reviews often ask whether a vendor has a continuity plan. They rarely ask where the vendor’s people and facilities actually are, or whether those overlap with the client’s own exposures. Concentration in one grid region, metropolitan area or weather zone is a correlated risk that a vendor’s plan may not reveal. Asking for locations of the teams that deliver critical services, and checking them against your own sites, takes a spreadsheet and a few questions.
All four dependencies can be tested in one exercise. Assume a whole region loses power, water and connectivity for five days, and apply it to staff, sites, networks and vendors together. The aim is to find which critical services have no answer at all, and to decide deliberately whether to accept that or invest in another region.
With hindsight
Texas passed legislation in June 2021 that restructured the grid operator’s board and required weatherization of power plants and some gas facilities. Federal energy regulators and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation published a detailed report on the event later that year. Load shedding on Uri’s scale did not recur in Texas in the winters immediately after.
Correlated regional failures recurred elsewhere. Winter Storm Elliott strained grids in the eastern United States in December 2022, and hurricanes, wildfires and floods in later years took out power and connectivity across whole regions. By 2026, operational resilience expectations in financial services, and a growing focus on resilience in health care and government, emphasize tolerances for disruption to important services under severe but plausible scenarios. Uri remains a clear example of why those scenarios must include the workforce and its homes, not only systems and buildings.