First Fires, Now Heat: Millions of Californians Face Outages
- Scorcher is forecast to last through the middle of next week
- Rolling blackouts are the first since 2001 energy crisis
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First, it was the prospect of wildfires that took down large swaths of California’s power grid. Now, it’s the worst heat wave in 70 years.
Climate change is contributing to increasingly extreme weather in California. Less than a year ago, millions of people were plunged into darkness in an effort to keep power lines from sparking catastrophic wildfires. This time, dangerously high temperatures are taxing the system, bringing about the state’s first rolling blackouts since the 2001 energy crisis.