After the Blackout

Update: Though our blackout is over, many more Californians are blacked out today--nearly two million--as power is off in areas of southern California as well as northern.  High winds and some fires in the San Francisco Bay area prompted this action, and there may be more to come.   

Our power came back on almost exactly 25 hours after it went off.  Nobody yet knows why, which is just a small part of what nobody seems to know about this incident.

Here's what I do know: I've been warning for years about the climate crisis interacting with our interdependent but vulnerable and non-redundant grid (and other systems) and the chaos that could result.  We got a very small taste of it here.

It was enough for us to begin to understand the consequences of these interactions: of years and years of ignoring consequences of climate crisis effects while also neglecting infrastructure to an extent that should have been shocking.

We learned that PG&E doesn't seem to know how its own systems operate, nor do they have adequate maps.  We learned that while the local power plant had more than enough power to keep the electricity flowing in Humboldt County, nobody knew how to do that.  And this is before we consider the updating that should have happened, to use computer systems and so on to create a smarter grid where outages could be better localized.

Let me explain again: we had no particular fire danger here.  It was a sunny, windy day, but the wind was cold, and we've had rain this month.  The fire danger was hundreds of miles to the south, but because of how PG&E manages our electrical grid, we were among the first to be blacked out.

While school children and high school students got some novelty, and college students got the day off  (all of them saved from madness because their smartphones mostly still worked), older adults got a taste of what this means.

Caught unawares and unable to quickly get into the mindset that tells them what things are going to be like without power, there was a rush for resources in the hours before the scheduled shutoff, and in places on the day.  It will be interesting to learn--if we ever do--what businesses etc. had plans in place, and which were improvising. Here in Arcata, gas stations and banks were closed (mostly), bank machines didn't work.  CVS, Arcata's major drug store and pharmacy, was closed, with a sign on the door that said the nearest CVS still open was in Crescent City, 90 miles to our north. There was a shoe store open, with a few browsers in the sunlight through the open door, and a few other shops.

Most of the places to buy food were closed: Safeway, Wildberries, restaurants and cafes.  Only the North Coast Coop was open.  I followed the trail of paper coffee cups in pedestrian hands to learn this at lunchtime on Wednesday.  It was a surreal scene--many more people than usual, milling around in the semi-darkness, almost silently.  They could have been zombies.  I didn't see any panic or anger, and also no particular camaraderie or recognition of the situation.  People were polite and insular.  Some of them were just there to have lunch, others bought groceries.  The dairy cases (including ice cream) had a half-off sign, but few if any people I saw opened them.

According to the radio, the most in demand items were ice and gasoline, and places to recharge phones and especially battery-operated medical machines, such as breathing machines.  The few authentically local radio stations were on the air--although I didn't hear that either of the NPR stations were.  The ones that were operating are part of the same structure as Lost Coast Outpost on the Internet, the prime resource for information related to the blackout.  However, nobody had wifi, so the only Internet access was through cellphones, at the risk of using power needed for emergency calls.

Which left radio (most easily accessible, even--as in my case--with an old battery-powered radio), and now I go into an old radio rant.  The great advantage of this network was that it combined the efforts of some fine local reporters with information volunteered by people who called in, so what resources were available could be made known.

But there are also major disadvantages in how this all works, especially when you want news without the necessity of listening all the time to the music programs randomly interspersed with news, most of which I can hardly bear.  First of all, the reliability of the information is untested.  Anybody can call in, and the reporters I heard seldom identified the sources of their info.  Everything was part of the usually insipid dj chatter.

The KHSU lockout

Second and most infuriating, there seem to be absolutely no regularly scheduled news broadcasts anymore, outside of NPR.  (The only public stations I heard however broadcast only the BCC, continuously.) Most conspicuous was the absence of local news from KHSU, the Humboldt University NPR station that earlier this year committed KHSUicide, or more accurately, it was murder by HSU, which fired almost the entire staff and turned away volunteers, to become little more than a national NPR conduit with operations elsewhere.

 Most of the commercial stations seem to be robo stations, with local commercials but content controlled in some remote location, or in any case, uninterested in local news.  But even the Lost Coast Communications local stations also do not have regularly scheduled news, as far as I know, and if they do, they do not promote it.

It used to be that EVERY radio station had a news summary of some kind at the top of the hour, and most had another at the bottom of the hour, or some other regularly scheduled time.  Now NONE of them do.  This is at best cynical money-grubbing, forcing listeners to endure hours of commercials for a few tidbits of news that is often indistinguishable from rumor or prank.

In any case, today businesses are picking up the pieces and things are not back to normal.  The supply chain, especially for perishables like eggs and milk, has likely been interrupted, and stuff like gasoline and perhaps even ice that ran out has to be replaced.  Regular deliveries were probably postponed when this was supposed to go on for more days.  The university will resume classes, but some students left town.  Some businesses today lacked employees who also left the area, because this was supposed to last three to five days.

Of course we're very happy it didn't.  But for others in California, the blackout goes on.  Apparently the majority of people whose power was cut off on Wednesday are still without it, and others have been added.

Here we had little more than a strange holiday.  Apart from dangers and inconveniences, we got enforced experiences in conversation substituting for television, and the night sky without light pollution.

But it would be the second day and beyond that really tested all sorts of things.  We'll see if individuals and institutions learn from this slice of experience, or simply go back to denial as usual.  And I'll be watching for what happens elsewhere, where the blackout goes on.