The Texas House of Representatives and the Texas Senate are gathering information on the statewide electrical blackouts. There will be a joint hearing of the House State Affairs and Energy Resources committees and a hearing of the Senate Business & Commerce committee at 9 a.m this Thursday, February 25 and . You can watch House State Affairs and Energy Resources online here and Senate Business & Commerce committee here. The public is invited to submit comments to the committees now. Please submit your comments to both the House and the Senate.

You have 3,000 characters to tell state lawmakers anything you want to about last week. A few things you might say:

• Your personal experience, including how long you went without power or water and how it impacted your family. How did you see the blackout and water outages impacting your community?

• What would you like to see changed? This was ultimately a failure of state leadership, including the Public Utility Commission of Texas, the Governor and Lieutenant Governor, and Texas legislators. They failed to recognize the increased risk of this type of weather due to climate change. They failed to adequately regulate the electricity market.