Who Gets Power?
I started this week off in the dark. On Sunday afternoon, as California was pummeled by a climate change- and El Niño-fueled atmospheric river, we lost power at our home, along with the rest of our neighborhood and much of our town. It wasn’t restored until the early hours of Tuesday, which meant no light, no heat, no stove or oven (we recently went electric), and (gasp!) no Internet for nearly 36 hours. Some 1.4 million PG&E customers across California lost power during the storm. Like many, I was annoyed at the inconvenience. I felt anxious about how it might disrupt hard-fought toddler bedtime routines, not to mention childcare on Monday morning. I worried about the food slowly warming in the fridge and temperatures slowly dropping in the bedrooms. Still, I know, my family had it pretty good. We could afford to replace our groceries if they went bad. (They didn’t.) We had friends nearby with back-up power sources who would take us in if our house got too cold. And we knew that utility crews were on site assessing the problem and doing what they could to get the lights back on. Not all Americans can say the same. Research shows that when outages occur, poorer communities linger longer in the dark. Specifically, a 1 decile drop in socio-economic status correlates, on average, to a 6 percent increase in power outage length. It’s not entirely clear why this is so, but experts think the delay likely relates to location: Lower-income households are more likely to be farther from critical infrastructure, which utilities prioritize for restoration, as well as in older neighborhoods with aging infrastructure that may require more extensive work to get up and running again. What we know for sure is that the type of extreme weather events that can lead to power outages — whether atmospheric rivers in California, hurricanes in Florida, or snow storms in New England — are occurring more frequently. It is past time to step up support for vulnerable communities when they experience outages, and to rethink our priorities when it comes to getting the lights back on.
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