Blackout in Arizona, Northern Mexico and Southernmost California

DCWilson

DCWilson

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Some of our regular members from Western Arizona and San Diego and Imperial counties in California won't be reading this forum for a while unless they have laptops, smart phones, or personal generators. SDG&E in particular, and other utilities to a lesser degree, have had a huge power failure that has left well over a million people without power. Outages are reported into Northern Baja California, Southwestern Arizona and up into Southern Orange County. This is going to last a while.

I'm not affected, but my daughter who lives about seven miles south of me as the crow flies has no power. When the sun sets in about an hour, I expect to see the impact from my front windows. On clear evenings I can see the lights of coastal communities from San Clemente to San Diego. I expect to see a lot of black out there tonight.
 
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I live 90 miles North of Yuma...never lost power here. What is interesting, and a bit concerning, is that they don't know why or where the failure occurred or what might have caused it. We just called friends in San Diego and they are still without power. They can see the I-5 freeway and they said traffic is barely moving, and that city streets are completely jammed because the traffic signals are out. Transmission towers and lines crisscross the county and most are totally vulnerable and unprotected.
 
Just a small taste of what things would be like if there was an attack on the power grid.
 
My a/c is running in Riverside Co, hottest days of the year. I'm a little nervous since the power is out just over the hill.
 
Update

Pretty dark out there on the ground under an almost full moon. Looks like San Clemente, Dana Point, San Juan Capistrano, Laguna Hills and most of Laguna Niguel are powerless in Southern Orange County. That's nearly half a million people right there. A few scattered neighborhoods in the dark zones have power; hard to figure how that is happening.

I can see a trail of light through San Clemente where I-5 heads south into Camp Pendleton. South of that the coast is dark where I would ordinarily see a string of illuminated cities in central San Diego County. I can't be sure if the power outage is universal down there because heat haze is scattering moonlight.

Given what I know of county populations in Southern California, there must be way more than the claimed 1.6 million people without power. There are 3 million people in San Diego County alone.
 
i rebuild, refurbish power transformers for a living,and we are seeing most of the utilities repairing there "old" transformers because there "spare" are already in place and are being stressed to there failing points. now that summer is ending,,the pressure on the grid should start to ease up....hopefully
 
People affected are being urged to activate their emergency plans, and are being advised that the outage could last into tomorrow.
Click to expand...

Emergency plans: Fire up gas grill, drop two ice cubes into glass, fill glass with scotch and enjoy a quiet evening.
 
We are getting a few Honda suitcase generators shortly. They can be tethered together for enough power to do what we need and they are fuel sippers. About $1K each, but several friends have them and they are great.
 
Our youngest son has been an Electrical Lineman for about five years now and says that it's only a matter of time before this country will have to face the fact that the nationwide grid systems need a major overhaul.

Even in areas where the transmission & distribution systems have been updated they are still tied, in many cases, to older systems that have been cobbled together over the years.

He has taken pictures at work and shown me poles that they had to replace that had been there since the 1930's that were simply a jumbled up mess. Over the years repairs had been done by crews who, it seemed, could have cared less so instead of making a fix properly they just slapped whatever would get the power back on up there and called it good. When this has been done numerous times in the same location for years, or even decades, it's a royal pain & can be dangerous to do even a simple repair. On the older Delta systems this just adds to the vulnerability of our grid systems as a whole, after all, you're only as strong as your weakest link.
 
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