Enjoying my look at current events from an antifragile perspective.

Here's the latest from my home town.

San Antonio’s Storm Outage: A Local Lesson in Anti-Fragility

Friday night’s storms were not subtle. My dog freaked out. High winds dropped poles, lines, and trees across the city. At the peak, more than 112,000 CPS Energy customers lost power. By Sunday afternoon, thousands were still without electricity as highs returned to the upper 90s. The city opened overnight resilience hubs. VIA offered free rides to cooling centers. That response matters. It is also a signal that the underlying system is still fragile.

A centralized grid is efficient on a normal day and brittle under concentrated stress. One derecho, one cluster of downed feeders, and whole neighborhoods go dark together. Anti-fragile infrastructure does the opposite. It absorbs the shock in pieces. Distributed solar, home batteries, microgrids, and neighborhood generation keep some lights on when the main line fails. The households and businesses that already had backup did not just survive. They became the places others went to charge phones, store medicine, and stay cool.

San Antonio already has pieces of the right response: resilience hubs, outreach to medically vulnerable residents, extra crews, and debris clearance so repair teams can reach the damage. Those are good recovery tools. They are not the same as a design that gets stronger from the next storm.

The useful question is not whether CPS restores the last outage. It will. The useful question is whether the next shock finds more local capacity, more modular power, and fewer single points of failure. Fragile systems hope the weather stays average. Anti-fragile systems treat Friday night as information and rebuild accordingly.