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.

Powerless...in the State of Confusion

Update 7 p.m.: It's now definite.  Lost Coast Outpost reports the plan to use local power has failed, and we got a robocall from the Arcata police announcing that Arcata will be without power, possibly for several days. 

The outages will hit the Central Valley, leaving them without air conditioning while it leaves northern areas without heat at night.  The economic costs could be substantial, although bypassing San Francisco and Silicon Valley may mitigate those.  Now the power companies for southern CA are suggesting they may cut power as well, although affecting hundreds of thousands fewer.

Update 10 p.m.  Just two hours away from our scheduled plunge back to the 18th century, and I worry about all the medical devices and breathing machines that aren't going to be working tonight or for some nights to come.  This is the price for the corporate malfeasance of PG&E that all parts of our government allowed to come to this.  Are we to believe that this danger from power equipment is not avoidable, not subject to better maintenance and technology?  Must it take lost lives and certainly a large economic loss to bring those questions into the light?  By the way, the PG&E site you're supposed to go to for information now crashes immediately.

Well, time to get out the quills and parchment.

Earlier today (Tuesday Oct. 8), our sole power company PG&E sent out via phone and text the warning that power in Humboldt County (or parts of it) "may" be cut off, beginning at around midnight tonight.  If it does go off, we could be powerless for up to five days.  That's days, not hours.

For out-of-staters, the background briefly is that PGE was found responsible by the courts for a big fire last year, due to sparks from a transformer or something.  The company is already in bankruptcy.  So this year, they planned to shut off power when weather conditions made a new forest fire more likely.  Right now there are big winds building in much of northern California, though the actual danger zone for fire is considerably south of us.

But location doesn't matter, because of the Grid.  When power is shut off in one place, it can affect far-flung places like Humboldt County, which is just one of more than 30 counties that may be affected, and something like 800,000 people.

 A good deal of the Bay Area will lose power, but mostly the more rural and poorer areas it looks like. San Francisco is to be spared, and farther south, Silicon Valley.

As of this afternoon, it seems more likely than not that power is going to be shut off here.  What we don't know--and apparently won't know until it happens--is who is going to be without power, and who might still have it.

The interesting thing is that Humboldt County generates enough power to take care of its own needs.  But the power generated here gets fed into the grid, and nobody seems to know how to keep that power local.

Nor does PG&E know what will happen in Humboldt when they shut down a couple of lines that come up here.  They have already shut off power for some Humboldt customers, as early as 10 this morning.

This is an unprecedented situation here, and it's hard for people to wrap their heads around it.  We lose power sometimes during winter storms, for a few hours up to a few days.  But five days--possibly some people in rural areas have experienced that, but I doubt that anybody in Arcata or even Eurkea has experienced it.

Electricity is like air to a modern society--it's necessary for almost everything, and it's always there.  It's hard to imagine it not being there for almost a week.  It probably would be easier to think about it if there were a visible local emergency.  But there's not.

I remember when electric power was a public utility.  I remember when localities had power over their power.

The only news I've seen is that there are blocks-long lines at the gas pumps at Costco in Eureka.  I expect that all the grocery stores are crowded.  Public schools have announced that they will be open tomorrow regardless, but the Humboldt State University web site information is confusing at best, stating that school buildings will be closed and students should stay in their dorms, which will be "locked down."  What does that mean?

So we've done the inventory check, and we seem good on the essentials.  The devices are recharging.  I did a load of laundry, took a shower.  If natural gas is not affected, we will have stovetop cooking and hot water from the gas water heater.  Water has never been affected in past outages.  My flashlight fetish may also pay off--we have many, and lots of batteries.  Also long-burning candles in glass.

But the truth is we don't know what to expect.  Past power outages have been pretty local.  A lot of normal infrastructure could be affected.  Refrigeration seems like it's going to be a big problem, beyond the home.

This is also a moment when the stark lack of local news reporting becomes important.  The Eureka Times-Standard, the last remaining daily, has cut back to almost no local staff.  There is little local television news.  Radio no longer does news regularly, and we'll see what they can generate in an emergency.  There's the Lost Coast Outpost web site, and a few blogs.  That's it.

But then we won't have wifi, and maybe nobody will.  They may not be able to post, and very likely I won't be able to receive.  Or to send.  So I guess, over and out.

Poetry Monday: What Thou Lovest Well Remains

“What thou lovest well remains
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
                                      or is it of none?

First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

Ezra Pound
excerpt Canto 81