Posted on 10/18/2024 9:24:27 AM PDT by Tell It Right
About 13,000 customers in Northern California woke up without electricity Friday after Pacific Gas and Electric shut off power to prevent its equipment from sparking wildfires amid dry weather and strong winds expected to last through part of the weekend.
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Targeted power shutoffs were also possible in Southern California, where another notorious weather phenomenon, the Santa Ana winds, are expected Friday and Saturday.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
It’s probably cheaper than properly maintaining the infrastructure.
Welcome to the Hotel Newsomfornia
Hot and Windy then
They cut the Power!?!
SoCal now The North,
Suck one.
Only 13000? Yeah, the whole thing is stupid but 12 Bay Area counties are a hell of a lot more than 13000 customers.
Makes a good case for gas!!
Babylon sisters shake it(Steely Dan)
So fine so young
Tell me I'm the only one
Here come those Santa Ana winds again
Unbelievable strong winds hit Las Vegas early this morning.
True that. Hopefully the gas stations have backup power to run the pumps.
It’s much cheaper than defending and perhaps losing lawsuits over not shutting down.
It’s not about heat, it’s about humidity.
It’s DRY.
So, you add forecast winds and clear skies into that mix and the past experience is that fires that ignite under these conditions blow up rapidly to consume large areas, quickly becoming very hard to get on top of and contain.
The locals out here still remember the Oakland Hills fire that burned thousands out of hose and home, and that’s been a couple decades ago. Add to that the more recent conflagrations that ate Paradise and savaged Santa Rosa, and you have this dynamic of public sentiment presenting PG&E with the Hobson’s Choice to leave the power on and be the guilty party, or turn the power off and be the guilty party. Never mind, of course that the actual guilty party is government as manifest in their idiotic forest land (mis-)management practices. But they’re protected as never before by the media, so it’s PG&E that’s gotta take the full hit.
But it’s not just California, nor even just the U.S.; Canadians in British Columbia have seen Jasper razed by fire, and have been railing against their government about the same sorts of shabby forested land management practices that we’re beset with here, and Halifax, NS has experienced similar grief.
To wrap on this, though, the news of power shutoffs in all 13 counties of the San Francisco Bay Area is 99% pure sensationalism. NOTHING is shut off anyplace suburban, it’s only the rural portions of the regional grid that are affected, which is why, although the area encompasses millions of people, only 13,000 or so are directly affected.
In areas subject to wildfires, burying the lines would make a lot of sense. Compared to a "bullet train to nowhere", it would be cheap, and money well spent.
Yuppers!
.
I lived in Poway 10 yrs....
Rural-—Yuppers!
Santa Anas are dry, warm and gusty northeast winds that blow from the interior of Southern California toward the coast and offshore, moving in the opposite direction of the normal onshore flow that carries moist air from the Pacific into the region.
A bad explanation of the adiabatic effect of air descending and heating under higher pressure
The population of the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area is over 7.7 million people:
Diablo wind is a name that has been occasionally used for the hot, dry wind from the northeast that typically occurs in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California during the spring and fall.
The same wind pattern also affects other parts of California’s coastal ranges and the western slopes of Sierra Nevada, with many media and government groups using the term Diablo winds for strong, dry downslope wind over northern and central California.[1]
The term first appeared shortly after the 1991 Oakland firestorm, perhaps to distinguish it from the comparable, and more familiar, hot dry wind in Southern California known as the Santa Ana winds. In fact, in decades previous to the 1991 fire, the term “Santa Ana” was occasionally used as well for the Bay Area dry northeasterly wind,[2] such as the one that was associated with the 1923 Berkeley Fire.[
You are correct, except all the infrastructure money has gone to building out solar and wind farms, not transmission lines. So…blackouts.
yes, well. necessary services, once upon a time, didn’t just stop functioning anytime things became risky.
Such a sensible suggestion.
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