California fires continue to cause major outages
PG&E Blackhawks. Image: PG&E
As the Los Angeles fires enter their third day, fanned by strong winds, over 400,000 southern California customers remain affected by widespread outages.
The fires, described variously as unlike anything seen before and the most destructive in local history, have caused widespread devastation, particularly in the Pacific Palisades area favoured by Hollywooders, who are among the hundreds whose homes have unfortunately been lost, with at least five deaths and many more injuries reported.
Over 100,000 residents also have had to evacuate the areas under threat of fines for not doing so.
The majority of the outages are in the service areas of Southern California Edison (SCE) and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), numbering respectively 314,300 for SCE and over 92,300 for LADWP as of Thursday pm, according to poweroutage.us.
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While both companies are restoring power as they can, they anticipate that many customers, particularly those near or within fire impacted areas are likely to incur extended outages into the weekend.
LADWP also is encouraging customers in affected areas to boil water but also to conserve water to ensure supply for further firefighting as the dry conditions and wind, albeit reported to be starting to abate, continue.
As is customary at such times for other utilities to provide aid, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has sent two Blackhawk helicopters to Los Angeles to support the firefighting efforts, arriving Wednesday afternoon.
PG&E also has mobilised 25 safety and infrastructure protection team crews to assist LADWP with its recovery efforts.
For its part PG&E reports monitoring ‘red flag’ conditions in portions of its service area and in response to the conditions has enabled enhanced powerline safety settings across circuits in multiple counties.
San Diego Gas & Electric also has been implementing public safety power shutoffs in certain communities to help reduce the wildfire risk under the prevailing conditions.
Hydroclimate whiplash
While the cause of the fire is reported to be still under investigation and the strong wind and dry conditions obviously the stimulant for the rapid spread and emergence of at least three other fires, the underlying theory gaining ground for these is termed ‘hydroclimate whiplash’ from the University of California Los Angeles.
Hydroclimate whiplash – or ‘hydroclimate volatility’ as it’s termed scientifically – is the occurrence of rapid swings between very wet and very dry weather conditions. As the atmosphere warms, the amount of water it can absorb and release increases, at a rate estimated at 7% for every 1oC of warming.
This then gives rise to greatly increased vegetation, which in hot summer conditions can become tinder dry and susceptible to fires.
Other potential impacts of wet to dry events are loss of hydropower and loss of crops. Conversely, from dry to wet conditions, flooding and landslides and consequent infrastructure damage can result.
In a paper in Nature Reviews fortuitously published this week, the UCLA researchers highlight significant increases in whiplash since the mid-twentieth century, up to two-thirds more, with further increases expected.
While such whiplash events can occur in virtually all land areas globally, the largest increases are expected at high latitudes and from northern Africa eastward into south Asia.
