PG&E power shutdowns planned for today
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PG&E is the power company in California, bankrupted by law suits stemming from the most tragic fires that took place in 2017 (October, I believe). Predictions are that weather conditions tonight will be similar to those back then.
So panic ensues, and of course some people are crying wolf, but who really knows what will transpire. I predict that controlled power outages will take place, and will possibly keep fires from sparking due to power lines banging into each other in the wind. But then, if no fires take place, we still can’t know for sure it was because inert power lines just harmlessly banged into each other. (Unless maybe someday they add some tech, like low-voltage sensing to keep track of when power lines bang into each other. I don’t know if that idea has ever been discussed.)
Anyways, sans any tragedy caused by powered up power lines, I’ll bet that a lot of people will complain about the power outages. But there is still humor here, in a facebook post supposedly posted by one city’s police department:
I may be over-simplifying the “power lines banging into each other” scenario, because I haven’t actually followed the forensics used to blame PG&E. Maybe power lines even broke and then sparked on the ground or something, I don’t know. I just chalk these failures up to the foibles of Humanity’s Modernity. Where people blame each other even for a lot of the unpredicted tragedies, and are not willing or able to spend money on the “right kinds of research and prevention”. And then we spend it instead on treatments and recoveries, like in health care. And we pray.
Good time to buy Generac stock, I am sure they are selling generators as fast as they can make them.
Another company that impressed me a great deal back in 2017 is Purple Air, who makes pro-sumer grade instruments that report realtime air quality measurements via internet. Los Angeles atm looks pretty clean at 12:30pm today, but if you look at northern CA, you can see instantly where smoke particles are, even if it’s invisible to the naked eye. (Clicking the above links later will show air quality at the time you click on it, e.g. they will almost all be green sometime after the fires pass.) And clicking on an instrument displays more detailed information, including recent history, so a trained eye can even predict the direction of local air movement.
In the links above, you can zoom in to see individual stations, many of which are at someone’s home, outdoors or even indoors. In 2017 I used these reports to see air quality practically instantly, while official reports over radio and other websites were up to a few hours behind. In one case, when the smoke was clearing, I noticed air quality reported from inside a hospital was still significantly lower than the air quality outside, and I thought about calling them to open their windows in case they weren’t monitoring their own instruments!
But for the record, here’s a map, current as of time of this writing:
Earlier this morning, winds were blowing south-southwesterly, and I’m guessing that some coastal winds were blowing west-northerly.
Caption: This photo of newlyweds Katie and Curtis Ferland at their wedding at Chateau St. Jean in Kenwood went viral when photographer Karna Roa posted it on Facebook. The photo was taken in late afternoon on Saturday, Oct. 26, with smoke from the Kincade wildfire, bearing down on Healdsburg and Windsor, in the background creating an orange sky around the sun and the couple, who flew in from Chicago, wearing respirator masks. (Karna Roa)
I could be wrong but those masks look like N95s, not very useful except to filter out ash and soot from nearby fires. If he’s wearing a beard, even an N100 mask would be mostly useless.
With so much more power out for safety’s sake than back in 2017, another local baby boom is expected, but larger. 😉
Can you tell me how far north the evac order extends if you get a chance.
Yikes, I’m sorry I missed that question! One way is to google ‘pg&e psps map‘ or similar, partly because the data sources and presentations evolve from year to year (or faster), so don’t expect any link to last longer than one event. (psps = public safety power shutoff) But there is one source of data that’s been a consistent favorite of mine since 2017:
For future reference, once again I highly recommend purpleair.com for reliable, up-to-the minute air quality status, unless instruments are not able to report when power is down. All the grey dots you see (below in today’s example) are purpleair stations without power, and clicking on a dot brings up a graph that shows recent history of measurements, which is also a way to learn how many minutes, hours, or days ago power went down. I really don’t understand why radio and print news sources rarely mention purpleair instead of relying so heavily on government data which tends to lag behind by a couple to several hours. I can even (usually) predict speed and direction of smoke based on surrounding purple air station data, and several times knew what was happening hours before such information was broadcasted.
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