Last month, more than 24,000 Bay Area residents experienced a power outage when a local fire affected PG&E equipment.
As a medical student at Stanford, I was on campus during the blackout, which lasted for days as temperatures soared over 100 degrees. Shortly before the outage, the National Weather Service had released a heat advisory signaling “the onset of extremely dangerous heat conditions.”
These overlapping threats of extreme heat and power outages expose the ways our state is unevenly and inadequately prepared to keep residents safe.
