In the Footprint of Severe Drought, Texas Wildfire Burns 275 Power Poles
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 03.16.06
From station KAMR of Amarillo TX: "...fires have knocked out power to a 700,000 acre area. Xcel Energy says it will take up to three weeks to get power back to more than 500 homes and businesses. The company says it will take a while to do it safely. Xcel Energy reports 275 power poles were destroyed in the fires." There are larger environmental points to be made from this local disaster. Drought drives fire, and regional drought is spreading across a portion of the US where solar input already favors solar photovoltaic (SPC) electicity generation. Add this to the power line downing from tropical storms, and we see paired, powerful forces turning interest to residential and commercial on-site generation. A good thing, as long as fire and hurricane protection measures are taken when green power sytems go in. Where Climate Change bites, green technology must follow. Take note TreeHuggers: the Deep South may take the lead in per capita on-site generation of solar power.
Perhaps some group with the resources could construct some sort of mobile PV power station (with co-located GMS cellphone/sat-link. I was in the Army as a communications guy and they have crude versions of exactly that setup only run by stinky diesel generators) which could be rapidly deployed to disaster areas. Obviously the government is more adept at holding press conferences to assign blame, so such a setup could both alleviate suffering and be the perfect RE propaganda.
I am from Texas, and our grasslands (like other states') our supposed to burn off completely during natural drought cycles, like right now. All the plant life has evolved to live in fire prone areas, but since humans started putting out the fires about 150 years ago, our ecosystems have been suffering. I live in an area that was once Blackland Prairie, but the native grasses have been overwhelmed by tree growth (fire kills off woody plants and the grasses grow back quicker after fire to out-compete the woody ones). So I feel for the people without power from the fires, but if we had realized the necessity of fire for most of our state in the first place, then fires wouldnt be seen as a tragedy, they'd be seen as a rebirth of the ecosystem.
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Excellent point. Should the drought continue, we might reasonably expect continuing selection toward spread of the native, drought tolerant grasses in this and similar regions. We will not see a return to dustbowl conditions in these situations precisely because the land use has switched from intensive cash cropping to sprawl. That is the situation on the periphery of so many metropolitan areas that once were surrounded by farms.