Texas is in a state of emergency after freezing temperatures and snowstorms have shut down power in multiple cities.
Texans have been coping with it all sorts of ways, some of them staying home and camping out in their own living rooms, along with all of their pets. Others have gone to hotels if they can find one with power and an empty room.
That’s what the family of TikToker @ray.k13 or Reni King did, deciding that it was best to leave their home in Amarillo and go to a hotel where they could care for their infant.
They’d been losing power off and on and their pipes froze, which aren’t great conditions for a baby. King told BuzzFeed that some of the rooms in their house has some warmth, but they didn’t have any in the room their daughter’s fish tank was set up in.
“Ever since Sunday the cold has not let up, and the snow keeps coming down,” said King.
Two days ago, they went home to get clean clothes. There they discovered the fish tank had frozen solid. She put footage of the ice cube fish on TikTok and its gotten over 23 millions views.
King lived in Colorado before Texas and says she’d withstood much worse weather there, and never had her pipes freeze.
Part of the issue in Texas is that homes aren’t weatherized for winter. They’re mostly designed to cool in extreme heat. The power grid, which isn’t attached to the larger country grid, isn’t set up to withstand weather like this either, which is why there have been so many power issues.
So King was pretty surprised to see the condition of the fish tank. “I never knew that that could really happen,” she said.
People have been begging for an update, and with the return of some heat to the house, the tank did thaw.
The inhabitants are Molly Fish, and King is pretty sure they’re dead as a doornail. But hopeful commenters insist they’re just stunned:
She’s letting them hang for now, but she says, “He looks very much dead to us.”
One of the smaller casualties of the disaster, but mourned nonetheless.