Californians were in peril during a heatwave. Their neighbors rose to the occasion
Sarah M. Smith sat sweating in her living room on the hottest day in Sacramento’s history, terrified and ready to make a run for it. Her son, Rex, depends on a ventilator just to breathe, and she and her husband Paul Colagiovanni knew soaring energy demands could lead to rolling blackouts.
“The idea of losing power, even for a short while,” Smith told The Bee, “is frightening.”
The couple double-checked the batteries in their 19-year-old son’s medical devices and packed his go-bag; they turned off the lights in their North Natomas apartment; they unplugged every non-essential appliance. Smith sat in the dark in the apple-green armchair, compulsively refreshing Twitter to see the news.
When she finally went to sleep, she had nightmares about ambulances.
But the blackouts never came. The next day, Smith learned that Sacramentans — along with much of California — had heeded emergency calls to conserve energy.
At 4 p.m. sharp, the people of the capital region had started turning things off.
“We are thankful that their conservation efforts helped us avoid rotating outages,” said Sacramento Municipal Utility District public information specialist Lindsay VanLaningham. The utility saw a noticeable dip in power usage, she said, “right at 4 p.m.”
As extreme heat fueled by human-induced climate change battered the entire state Tuesday, downtown Sacramento reached an all-time high temperature of 116 degrees around 5 p.m. While Rex and his parents were ready to evacuate their home to go somewhere with stable power, not everyone can, and widespread blackouts would have had severe and even deadly consequences. Well over 1,000 people die in the U.S. each year from heat-related causes each year, and babies, young children, people with certain medical conditions and seniors are the most vulnerable during a heatwave.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Heat is the leading weather-related killer in the United States, even though most heat-related deaths are preventable through outreach and intervention.”
With these life-or-death stakes in mind, around 5:45 p.m., the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services also sent out its own message: a mass alert delivered straight to people’s phones. “Turn off or reduce nonessential power if health allows,” the message begged.
Only two such alerts on the emergency wireless service had ever been sent out by OES, said Brian Ferguson, the deputy director of OES’s Crisis Communication and Public Affairs Team. The most recent previous alert came in 2020 in response to the COVID pandemic; in 2019, the agency sent an alert to Southern Californians during extreme fire weather.
“On Tuesday night, when things looked most dire” — and about two and a half million Californians were about to lose power on a day of record-breaking heat and record-breaking air-conditioning use — OES decided to send out the alert, Ferguson said. “We felt it necessary to protect public health and safety to use our wireless emergency alert system.”
That broader alert worked, too: “We saw about 1000 megawatts come off the grid in the first five minutes and 3000 megawatts in the 30 minutes after the alert was issued,” Ferguson said. “It had almost an immediate impact.”
The agency had prepared the message that very day, and had to have it approved by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Ferguson said he and his colleagues were happy that it worked:
“It was really a testament to not us,” he said, “but to the Californians who understood the severity of the crisis and took action to protect their neighbors.”
The Smith-Colagiovanni family skipped their normal TV routine that night. Rex was the only family member who used an electronic source of entertainment Tuesday: His iPad was plugged in as he watched a Star Trek movie in his room, while his parents tried to conceal their panic. The recent Natomas High School graduate, who is nonverbal and could not be interviewed prior to publication, likes to meet dogs and watch birds and sea lions on the waterfront in Old Sacramento, but he’d been trapped inside all day to avoid the brutal heat.
Because of the collective effort to save power Tuesday, Rex got to have a pretty normal night.
“We were delighted the next day when the charts showed how much effort Californians had put into immediately reducing electricity use after those alerts,” Smith said. “It made us feel so much safer, knowing that so many people cared and did their part.”
This story was originally published September 10, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
