Restoration and Impacts from the September 8, 2011, San Diego Power Outage
Publication: Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Volume 20, Issue 2
Abstract
This case study discusses post-event reconnaissance research of the September 8, 2011, power outage that left San Diego County, California, without electricity for up to 12 h. The objective of this case study is to synthesize and analyze the impacts of the outage and responses to the event. Understanding the outage’s impacts and responses helps to reveal restoration practices and contexts that promote meeting both technical and nontechnical goals. This study reveals several issues related to restoration decision-making and communication related to critical customers, particularly those responsible for health care, wastewater and potable water management, fuel provision, and food service. Restoration did not occur and was not communicated in such a way to avoid impacts to dependent critical infrastructure, reflect state restoration criteria, or meet expectations of a variety of power customers. Insight from this case study suggests three themes to guide research and development of best practices for power restoration: (1) emergency preparedness and public information, (2) power continuity, and (3) protocols and planning. Assessment of these themes are put in context with other studies of contemporary power outages and restoration to argue that power restoration protocols, policy, and planning are an important area for interdisciplinary research.
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Acknowledgments
Part of this research was funded by National Science Foundation grant #0927356 “Repeat Disaster Impacts to Infrastructure Networks and their Effects on Economic Agent Recovery, “ as well as Natural Hazards Center Quick Response Grant #56299. The Twitter data for this work were obtained from Project HEROIC (Principal Investigators Jeannette Sutton and Carter T. Butts), which was supported under NSF awards CMMI-1031853 and CMMI- 1031779.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Infrastructure Systems
Volume 20 • Issue 2 • June 2014
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 7, 2012
Accepted: Jun 20, 2013
Published online: Jun 21, 2013
Published in print: Jun 1, 2014
Discussion open until: Jun 9, 2014
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