As temperatures hovered over 110F (43C) for a fourth consecutive week in Phoenix, heat-related illness calls for emergency services spiked to more than double the level seen at this time last year.
The numbers illustrate just how fragile humans are in extreme heat. And this single indicator showing the limit of human endurance shot up at a time when power systems functioned well and no blackouts occurred.
Last year, Europe experienced over 60,000 heat-related deaths due to uncharacteristically hot weather, according to a recent analysis. The problem was, in part, a lack of cooling infrastructure. But it suggests the fatalities that might occur in the US after a prolonged grid failure.
In other words, things could be much worse.
Blackouts and heat are a deadly combination. Half the population of Phoenix would land in the emergency room if a multi-day blackout struck during a heat wave, and nearly 13,000 people would die, according to a study published in May in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
Most people in the US tend not to worry about blackouts because they still tend to be fairly uncommon and brief. Even in Phoenix, with its record-breaking stretch of daily highs at or above 110F, the grid is holding.
But that’s not a sure thing going forward. Last week the largest US grid — serving 65 million customers from Washington, DC to Illinois — issued an emergency alert raising concern about its ability to maintain enough power reserves as people crank up their air conditioners.
Fragility is commonplace across US energy infrastructure. “The wires and poles are getting older, and the weather is getting more difficult, and the population’s getting bigger,” says Michael Webber, a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas at Austin.
Most big blackouts in the US are triggered by storms physically damaging the grid — ripping down power lines, snapping poles or flooding substations. But extreme temperatures, hot or cold, can turn out the lights, too. Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 froze gas pipelines across Texas and knocked out power plants whose owners had ignored prior warnings to weatherize their gear. Roughly 4.5 million homes and businesses went darkin sub-freezing temperatures, many of them without electricity for days. More than 200 people died.
Federal data shows that in recent years, as increasingly extreme weather driven by climate change collides with an aging grid, blackouts have been happening more often and lasting longer. A decade ago, the average US home experienced a sustained outage 1.2 times per year, lasting three hours on average, according to the US Energy Information Administration. In 2021 — the most recent year for which data is available — the average number of blackouts per customer had risen to 1.4, with the power out for more than 5 hours.
Emergency managers are acutely aware of the threat. “Electricity is really the cornerstone of disaster recovery,” said Bryan Koon, vice president of homeland security and emergency management at IEM, a disaster management consulting firm. “When you don’t have it, everything is hard. When you have it, everything becomes a little bit easier.”
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In theory, in Maricopa, healthy people with resources have the ability to flee if the situation is life-threatening. “Flagstaff is only two hours away,” Coleman says, referring to the city which has a higher elevation and therefore is usually cooler than greater Phoenix.
It’s likely that many would do just that, but fleeing requires forethought. Many home garage openers and pumps at gas stations are powered with electricity. And how Flagstaff or other Western cities would manage hundreds of thousands of refugees from Phoenix is anyone’s guess.
But a woman who sits air-conditioned rooms typing all day told me that humans survived this heat in the past, so what’s the big deal?
“Many home garage openers and pumps at gas stations are powered with electricity.”
This century’s garage doors have manual means to open doors, typically an overhead rail lock release. It should be easy enough to manually lift a standard aluminum door.
https://images.ctfassets.net/fpe0ec7r30ix/5wXdsG9jj8dK1T0pKsAlag/b572fb86a5c86b7b78dc1dac1486deec/ART-GDO-How-to-Open-a-Garage-Door-With-an-Opener-Manually.jpg
As for gas pumps, after Hurricane Ida my sister’s neighbor with the full PV solar setup could charge his EV at home. (They have sun in Phoenix, don’t they?)
Oh boy – you are not expecting people to manually open their garage doors are you ?
“As Temperature Goes Up, Cognitive Performance Goes Down”
https://creyos.com/resources/articles/temperature-up-cognitive-performance-down
I also read somewhere that CO2 affects cognitive abilities, and the average is declining – shouldn’t we be worried ??
420 ppm CO2 is enough to affect plants, but levels would have to go much higher to equal what we experience indoors all the time. I read years ago that men wearing ties had a measurably lower level of oxygenated haemoglobin getting to their brains, so that might explain a lot…
Rising CO2 baseline is the distant third problem of CO2 emissions (behind global warming and ocean acidification). Places that had a problem with indoor cumulative CO2 are now starting with a higher ambient number.
What also explains a lot about red states that refuse to dump coal, is that lead causes both lower IQ and aggression, and toxic mercury causes a wide range of cognitive dysfunctions. The, or a main source of both is burning coal. (Oil & gas have their own unique and interesting cognitive and emotional effects.)
I would expect IQ-lowering toxicity from FF burning would be more prominent in urban areas or “brownfield” suburbs (aka “across the tracks”) than in rural areas.
Since the horrific effects of urban pollution caused legislators to get rid of leaded gas and lead paint, coal is by far the worst source of lead and toxic mercury; those are the substances with the worst cognitive, behavioral and emotional effects. They are spread globally now; a lot falls on crops and is washed into the seas with agricultural poisons, creating dead zones and warnings for pregnant women not to eat fish. In fact at this point, saying you’re crazy if you eat fish is a statement dripping with meaning—bidirectional meaning. You think it’s a coincidence the French word for fish is poisson?
Well yes, of course it is, but take the hint. Don’t make me haul out my multi-post sample of studies on the the mental effects of fossil fuels.
Breathing polluted air shortens lives by as much as 3 years on average where it’s worst. Since averages are very stubborn things, with inertia, that’s an astounding, disturbing effect. Yet one that comes packaged with its own hope, since we’re now emerging from the smog of more than a century of burnin that shite because we’re eliminating it through efficiency, wiser lives, and clean safe fast cheap reliable resilient renewable energy.
“Air Pollution Shortens Life Expectancy” Inside Climate News, 03/03/2020
Blood lead concentrations as low as 5 µg/dL, once thought to be a “safe level”, are associated with mental and other effects: lower IQ, learning disabilities, reduced attention span, aggression, anti-social impulses and behavior, coma, convulsions, death. Accumulates in teeth, bones, leaks into fetus from mother.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/lead-poisoning-and-health
Lead has been linked to reduced IQ, ADHD, school failure and criminality – even at low levels. Research suggests exposure during pregnancy may increase a child’s risk of developing autism. Ben Franklin warned about the toxicity, but it increased in the world anyway, linked to increasing crime in country after country in the 20th century until reduced by law; then its decline was also precisely in step with declining crime.
Coal is mostly burned in rural areas in red states. Smoke is increasing across vast areas, mostly rural. Heat and CO2 also reduce IQ, heat increases hate speech, air pollution increases suicide and dementia, childhood exposure increases all kinds of mental disorders, and NO2 causes depression and anxiety. Even tiny amounts of mercury (LD50 is as low as 1 mg/kg) are linked to emotional instability, reduced cognitive function and memory loss, and ½ of it comes from coal.
So no wonder about the South, eh?
Speaking of which, BTW, Vogtle ain’t stirred a nucular rennetsauce so much as brought new awareness to the effects of radiation; it’s linked to childhood leukemia, tritium to Down’s Syndrome, etc.
Lead: America’s Real Criminal Element
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/
An Updated Lead-Crime Roundup for 2018
Kevin Drum Feb. 1, 2018
Vogtle isn’t likely to increase demand for nuclear just based on its being so late and over budget. That will scare investors and policy makers away for sure.
“The region is home to tortoises, foxes and lynx, as well as a large number of Joshua trees, a kind of flowering yucca that can survive for hundreds of years, but has little natural resistance to fire.”
https://www.rfi.fr/en/science-environment/20230731-fire-whirls-threaten-joshua-tree-desert-in-scorching-us