The “bomb cyclone” that hit large swaths of the country left hundreds of thousands of Americans without power at one point or another over Christmas weekend, exposing vulnerabilities in the country’s electrical system.
In Buffalo, N.Y., power substations froze, leaving 250,0000 homes and businesses without electricity on Sunday morning. Duke Energy imposed rolling outages in North and South Carolina amid increased demand, causing nearly 500,000 to lose power at one point on Saturday.
Outages in the state of Maine reached a peak of 300,000 as strong winds impeded system repairs. Wind and rain also led to tens of thousands of outages in Oregon on Tuesday.
Texas got permission from the Energy Department to skirt environmental regulations and burn dirtier fuel to prevent blackouts after underestimating electricity demand.
Separately, power substations near Tacoma, Wash., were allegedly attacked, causing 14,000 homes to lose power.
The various outages are being caused by a variety of factors: high power demand amid cold temperatures, downed power lines from wind in some cases, and power plants going offline or cutting production.
Varun Rai, a public affairs professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said that the country’s grid system may not have been prepared because of just how “unprecedented” this extreme weather event was.
“To be prepared, en masse, for a country as large and as heterogeneous in terms of weather conditions and human conditions … it’s pretty unprecedented,” Rai said.
