Heat Wave and Blackout Would Send Half of Phoenix to E.R., Study Says

New research warns that nearly 800,000 residents would need emergency medical care for heat stroke and other illnesses in an extended power failure. Other cities are also at risk.

If a multiday blackout in Phoenix coincided with a heat wave, nearly half the population would require emergency department care for heat stroke or other heat-related illnesses, a new study suggests.

While Phoenix was the most extreme example, the study warned that other cities are also at risk. Since 2015, the number of major blackouts nationwide has more than doubled. At the same time, climate change is helping make heat waves worse and increasing instances of extreme weather around the world.

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, suggests that the risk to cities would be compounded if a hurricane, cyberattack or wind storm were to knock out power during a heat wave and deprive thousands of air-conditioning.

This summer, two-thirds of North America, including the Southwest, could experience shortfalls in the electrical grid, particularly during periods of extreme heat when demand for air-conditioning spikes, straining resources, according to an analysis released this month. Phoenix's mayor, Kate Gallego, has urged the federal government to add extreme heat to the list of disasters like floods and hurricanes that could prompt a federal disaster declaration... nyt

E.P.A. Announces Crackdown on Toxic Coal Ash From Landfills

"The Biden administration is moving to close a loophole that had exempted hundreds of inactive coal ash landfills from rules designed to prevent heavy metals like mercury and arsenic from seeping into groundwater, the Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday.

Coal ash, a byproduct from burning coal in power plants, contains lead, lithium and mercury. Those metals can pollute waterways and drinking water supplies and have been linked to health effects, including cancer, birth defects and developmental delays in children. They are also toxic to fish.

The proposed regulation, part of a settlement between the E.P.A. and environmental groups, would require those responsible for the coal ash to monitor groundwater supplies and clean up any contamination from the landfills.

Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, said the rule would help to protect low-income communities of color, where the overwhelming number of old landfills are located."

(Full article link - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/climate/epa-coal-ash-landfills.html?auth=forgot-password&referring_pv_id=maAztSud9J138ausgVBrq3Pc )

How to Quit Cars

"… Progressive urban planners genuinely believed, in a period of panic about the death of cities, that their renewal depended on up-to-date infrastructure. The sensibilities that, in the nineteen-seventies, tore down beautiful old Shibe Park, in North Philadelphia, and moved the Phillies to the soulless Veterans Stadium considered the move an obvious improvement. That the electric trolleys being abandoned in Philadelphia were greener and more efficient was not an insight available to that time. We need not find cloaked and sinister reasons for our ancestors' bad decisions, when ignorance and shortsightedness—the kind we, too, suffer from, invisible to us—will do just fine..."

—Adam Gopnik

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/22/carmageddon-daniel-knowles-book-review-paved-paradise-henry-grabar