Year: 2017

Credit: Mercury News With strong winds blowing and bone-dry conditions, utility officials in San Diego on Thursday began shutting off the power to thousands of people — a pre-emptive move to reduce the danger of power lines sparking wildfires.It’s a controversial approach that may soon become a growing trend across California. As huge fires continued to envelope parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, San Diego Gas & Electric cut electricity to 12,000 customers in San Diego County by Thursday afternoon, after Santa Ana winds reached 88 mph in some rural areas. Even though no fires were burning in San Diego County on Thursday morning, the utility notified up to 170,000 customers that they could have their power shut off by Saturday as a safety precaution, and that electricity in some affected communities wouldn’t…

Southern California Edison Addresses Massive Power Outage From Thomas Fire By: Alys Martinez Posted: Dec 05, 2017 10:49 PM PST Thousands of people are still without power, one day after the Thomas Fire broke out in Ventura County. On Monday night, at the height of the outage, more than 200,000 people were in the dark. Power to most has been restored, but thousands are still without. "This isn't your local neighborhood power outage, that's not the problem. The highway, so to speak, for electric power is affected," said Southern California Edison public information officer David Song. There is essentially only one way in and one way out, according to Song. "The power delivery being affected right now is really kind of the freeways and highways of our system delivering volt power on a regional scale," he said.

Hurricane Maria, the 15th tropical depression this season, is now battering the Caribbean, just two weeks after Hurricane Irma wreaked havoc in the region. The devastation in Dominica is “mind-boggling,” wrote the country’s prime minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, on Facebook just after midnight on September 19. The next day, in Puerto Rico, NPR reported via member station WRTU in San Juan that “Most of the island is without power…or water.” Among the Caribbean islands impacted by both deadly storms are Puerto Rico, St Kitts, Tortola and Barbuda. In this region, disaster damages are frequently amplified by needlessly protracted and incomplete recoveries. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan rolled roughshod through the Caribbean with wind speeds of 160 mph. The region’s economy took more than three years to recover. Grenada’s surplus of US$17 million…

Every year disasters take lives, cause significant damage, inhibit development and contribute to conflict and forced migration. Unfortunately, the trend is an upward one. In May 2017, policy-makers and disaster management experts from over 180 countries gathered in Cancun, Mexico, to discuss ways to counter this trend. In the middle of the Cancun summit, news arrived that large parts of Sri Lanka were devastated by floods and landslides, killing at least 150 and displacing almost half a million people. It was a stark reminder of the summit participants’ challenging task of paving the way towards reducing disaster losses “significantly” by the year 2030 based on the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). Adopted in 2015, the Sendai Framework outlines seven targets and four priorities for action to prevent new,…