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Comment by HelloMcFly | Hacker News Reader

Over a million people lost power in Texas just about one week ago, an issue that continued to impact hundreds of thousands of people days after the event. Hundreds of thousands lost power for multiple days last winter as well following another cold snap. Those are two events I can recall by memory - one because it's so recent, the other because I was personally impacted by it.

Do other states regularly have multi-day outages that impacts hundreds of thousands of people? I know California has at times with wildfires, but other than that? Are these issues below the line for being considered "systemic"? I'm actually asking, not refuting using question marks.

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Both of those events were due to localized weather events that destroyed local power infrastructure (specifically, storms that destroyed overhead power lines). These are things that have not to do with federal regulations, which is the topic of this thread.

And yes, other states have this problem as well. See https://poweroutage.us/about/majorevents.

>Do other states regularly have multi-day outages that impacts hundreds of thousands of people?

Yes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Sandy_i...

Sandy was relatively weak when it hit the East Coast. Most Texans wouldn't blink an eye at a category 1 with 80 MPH winds. That's the same wind speeds as the storm that hit Texas a few weeks ago and knocked power out.

… so it did blink?

Who is it? And no, Texans just shrugged.

This is a pretty weak argument. I am not sure how the grid was supposed to prepare for the most recent storm.

I'm not making an argument, I have no "position" that I'm advancing.

I've seen the headlines, I was asking for clarification on what made those different. I do think "storm preparedness" is not a category that should be excluded from consideration given their occurrence is also systemic (and may increase due to climate change), but I'm also open to how these outages differ from more systemic outages. The difference that makes sense to me is that federal regulations - the topic at play here - wouldn't have impacted these situations at all. Makes sense.

I don't believe you can fully prepare a grid for winds bringing down trees and residential/transmission lines. That's the distinction. The winter outage could have been handled better both from preparation and from the crisis management.

> I don't believe you can fully prepare a grid for winds bringing down trees and residential/transmission lines

No, but perhaps you can have better plans for responding to such events, different staffing practices, temporary measures of some sort, etc.

That wouldn't affect the number of people who had power outages which is the metric mentioned earlier

Well the problem was not a temporary loss of power, it's how long their power stayed out.

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