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Get Used to It

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Today’s suggestion? Get used to it.

Days of unspeakable heat? The heat taking the usual storm systems and turning them excessively violent? Lack of investment in infrastructure making recovery from those storms lengthy and piecemeal?

Check, check, and check. Remember the “Snowstorm of 88” narratives we all grew up listening to? The next generation of the-weather-is-bigger-than-we-are stories will be the ones people on the Mid-Atlantic are telling this week: “Where were you when the lights went out?”


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As for me, I was hanging around at my house in Raleigh, NC. Guests gone, kids asleep, and sudden wind gusts as we felt the very bottom end of … something. Something turned out to be a derecho, a kind of thunderstorm on steroids. As the earthsky.org story says, “the above average temperatures being experienced across the area … act[ed] as fuel for this system.” Check out some of the videos on the site, especially the radar maps. That storm crossed the eastern states at 60 mph!

Wind blew down a tree somewhere in my neighborhood, and my block went dark. A midnight adventure down our darkened street with my wide-eyed seven-year-old showed no damage at the substation and lights on in adjacent blocks, so we knew our wait would be short. It was.

Not for everybody else. As of June 30 at 5 .m., more than a million and a half people were facing more 90-plus-degree weather without a cold drink or an electric fan, much less air conditioning and cable.

Above average temperatures? Bigger and worse storms? Get used to it.

As for the power grid, according to Venturebeat, “An outage of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud in North Virginia [took] down Netflix, Pinterest,Instagram, and other services.” They were back up soon enough, but this is what it looks like now when the power goes out. The next day we went to a movie and saw a sign on the door that if the theater experienced one of the brownouts they were having, we were to keep calm; they’d get the movie back up as soon as they could. We were lucky – “Brave” ran uninterrupted. You should see it – it’s real good.

Anyhow, that grid, though, and recovery from storms and response to demand surges? Uh-oh. The American Society of Civil Engineers in its 2009 Report Card gave our electrical infrastructure a D+, and a 2011 followup report under the title “Failure to Act” laid out the economic consequences of standing around and watching stuff fail. If you think a few trillion dollars of lost GDP by 2040 and more than a half million lost jobs by 2020 you’ll be right on. Again -- that's not the trillions of dollars by which we're behind in maintaining and building our infrastructure -- that's the money we'll fail to make because we don't have it. See? Failure to plan earns interest!

And have you noticed the resulting spending spree as investors and taxpayers lined up to make the unsexy investments in transmission lines, backup generation, peaker plants, distribution redundancy, and the kind of smart grid technology that limits outages to the smallest possible area and communicates trouble to the central office? Don’t feel bad – I haven’t noticed it either.

As for communication, remember – the way most electrical utilities get information on downed power lines is by using trained mammals to push buttons when the power goes off, and when they push the buttons a bell rings in the utilities’ offices. That is, they wait until you and I call them to tell them the power’s off. The Urban Land Institute's "Infrastructure 2012" doesn't paint a much prettier picture.

So. Hurricane season is just starting, and the ocean is warming up. Thunderheads get bigger every day, and there’s only so many trucks with yellow rotating lights. Where were you when the lights went out? I was inside, banging on my VOIP phone, unable to tell the power company my power was out. Fortunately, the cell phone was charged and the tower had a generator.

 

Scott Huler was born in 1959 in Cleveland and raised in that city's eastern suburbs. He graduated from Washington University in 1981; he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa because of the breadth of his studies, and that breadth has been a signature of his writing work. He has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as ESPN, Backpacker, and Fortune. His award-winning radio work has been heard on "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day" on National Public Radio and on "Marketplace" and "Splendid Table" on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He was the founding and managing editor of the Nashville City Paper. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His books include Defining the Wind, about the Beaufort Scale of wind force, and No-Man's Lands, about retracing the journey of Odysseus.

His most recent book, On the Grid, was his sixth. His work has been included in such compilations as Appalachian Adventure and in such anthologies as Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, The Appalachian Trail Reader and Speed: Stories of Survival from Behind the Wheel.

For 2014-2015 Scott is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which is funding his work on the Lawson Trek, an effort to retrace the journey of explorer John Lawson through the Carolinas in 1700-1701.

He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their two sons.

More by Scott Huler