It's definitely too local for HN, but it's a good conversation so I don't care :) > I didn't know that emergency services weren't told, that's weird. Sorry if

It's definitely too local for HN, but it's a good conversation so I don't care :) > I didn't know that emergency services weren't told, that's weird. Sorry if I implied they weren't informed at all, the reporting I read was that they weren't informed with enough certainty or lead time to sufficiently prepare. And I think this also goes back to what I think is the deeper point that this shouldn't be an hours vs. days thing, but a months to years thing. If the monopoly utility for a region has concluded that wildfire risk has become so high that they need to start doing large-scale preemptive de-energization to safely manage it, for the first time ever, I think that should be highly publicized and closely coordinated with the municipalities and emergency services involved. Again, maybe this all happened and I just missed it, but I have looked and not found anything about it anywhere. For instance, the stoplight situation was dire. Perhaps some of the stoplights on roads where the speed limit is 65 could be upgraded with a backup power capability, if there were some lead time on this? I dunno, maybe that's totally impractical for an outage that lasts over a day. But that's another thing... Is it really acceptable for a discretionary outage to last for almost a day after the weather event has cleared up? I understand that it's very challenging to reenergize dead lines, but it's hard to be as sympathetic to that when turning those lines off in the first place was a choice, rather than a result of the weather itself. > Also, when a live power line goes down, they get a signal that's pretty accurate as to where the break is. When a dead power line goes down and then gets damaged later, they don't know where it is and have to put eyes on every foot of line before they reenergize to make sure it's safe. To me, this reads like a very good reason to not de-energize lines unless it absolutely cannot be avoided! And that's the thing, at the bottom of all of this, I feel like, I've lived here for decades, and it will be difficult to convince me that "preemptive power outages absolutely could not be avoided" was true for this storm, but not of any of the others like it that I have experienced in that time.