Crisis? What Crisis?

This week's blog really has to be about the power cuts and wildfires here in California that you've probably all read about. Before we get into the story, I should reassure everyone that we are absolutely fine here - there are no wildfires anywhere near where we are living, we didn't have any power cuts at all, and the weather was really no different to how it usually is here this week.

But one of the things we've learned about our American cousins is that they love a crisis, and will turn even a small disruption into something newsworthy. Now this is not to say that this week's situation wasn't serious - it really was, with a lot of worry after the very bad fires suffered in California a couple of years ago, in which a number of people died - but you'd have thought we were due for a world-changing apocalypse here as a result of the power going off.

The risk of fire came as a result of an especially dry mass of air moving through the state from North to South, accompanied by some higher than usual winds. The local power provider, PG&E, pre-emptively cut the power in the highest-risk areas because the 2017 wildfires were, in part, started by equipment of theirs; and, this being the US, they were sued for a lot of money because of that.

The power cuts were initially announced as "potentially impacting the whole Bay Area", which meant some possibility of losing power at home in Palo Alto, and even in the office down in Sunnyvale. PG&E published some maps showing the areas which would actually lose power on Tuesday night, but of course their website wasn't able to handle the traffic, and it wasn't possible to access them. Eventually they published the maps on Twitter, and we could see that the areas near us losing power were up in the hills behind Palo Alto rather than down in the town.

The dry air and winds came through on Wednesday and Thursday. It was fairly windy for round here, which broadly means par for the course for a September day in the UK. There were a couple of small fires in the area, but nothing serious. The major fires you're seeing reported in the news are outside LA, which is 400 miles South of here - i.e. the distance from London to Edinburgh.

In terms of our own preparations, it turns out we've got plenty of candles, but apparently no matches. We'll try to fix that before the next potential apocalypse!