Black to Not

Another day of confusion, but at least here, with a happy ending.

Our power was supposed to go off again at 4 a.m., in a black to black blackout.  It didn't.  Around 8 a.m. people started noticing but there was no official word on it.  An argument broke out among relevant organizations because one of them said the outage had been postponed to 9 p.m., if it was going to happen at all.  Other organizations called them rumor mongers, or the social media equivalent.

But hours later that became the semi-official word.  Then PG&E said the blackout would start at 7 p.m.  It was starting to make less and less sense, since the winds were supposed to diminish.  Humboldt's Emergency Management got snippy in their announcement, complaining of PG&E's unhelpfulness.   Among other things, it turns out that the utility has a different definition of "Humboldt" than the rest of us.  To them it is a district that includes parts of H County and parts of others.  But for awhile they said northern Humboldt County would lose power at 7 p., and they continued to say that Southern Humboldt had lost power at 7 a.m. Which they hadn't.

Then around 5 p.m., PG&E announced it was calling the whole thing off.  Nobody who had power was going to lose it, because the wind velocity was below that deemed dangerous.  Also the short and long range forecasts suggest a respite from high winds and hence intentional blackouts.

I know that this narrative of the latest episode of Humboldt County and PG&E makes for less than timeless reading.  However, this is a record of what happened, commensurate with how we experienced it.  For example, I spent a lot of time today frantically trying to prioritize and get things done before they became massively inconvenient in the dark, not to mention the cold.  Well, it's still cold outside, but we've got light and heat inside after all.  As an experience, I'd suggest that the mental effort and manipulation of anxiety and adrenalin prompted not only by the blackouts themselves but all the uncertainty and crazy turns of information made it all especially exhausting.

Perhaps that will leave an impression, and these communities will take seriously the fragility of the grid and the associated problems of the climate crisis, or more precisely now, the climate emergency.

Meanwhile, other parts of the state suffered real blackouts, and fires raged.  People outside this massive and varied state tend to lump it all together, or distinguish only Los Angeles (southern CA) from San Francisco (northern CA), in conjunction with their respective cliches.  But there are many differences--and probably more micro-climates than any other state.  That isn't stopping the nonsense being written about what all this means, at least in terms of devising responses.  They will need to be different, according to local circumstances.

It's true however that we have in common that it's pretty much all driven by the climate emergency. The climate emergency is becoming the default reality.  That doesn't make it less of an emergency.  It makes it more of one.