Background - Climate Change and Infrastructure, Urban Systems, and Vulnerabilities - page 14

five days. By the end of the first day, a water main ruptured, flooding streets in the
downtown area for five days. Fire and water effects damaged an electric power cable,
leaving 1200 buildings without electricity. The accident also destroyed a communica-
tion system fiber-optic cable passing through the tunnel, slowing Internet service in the
Northeast; and train, bus, and boat transportation were also disrupted (htp://www.fra
.dot.gov/downloads/RRDev/brn1.pdf): pp. 2-18.).
The San Diego blackout on September 9, 2011
On September 9, 2011, power was lost to approximately 7 million power customers in
San Diego (personal communication, SDG&E) and lasted for 12 hours. The blackout
covered areas of Arizona, California and Mexico during the hotest portion of the day
and temperatures in some parts of the outage area reached 115 degrees Fahrenheit. The
causal sequence occurred over an 11 minute period when at least 20 events, some whose
significance is still being determined, cascaded through the communication and power
infrastructures beginning in Arizona. High temperatures and infrastructure stresses
caused disruptions and impacts across urban infrastructures.
The blackout disrupted both emergency communications and the impacted popu-
lation's ability to respond, curtail power demand, or be warned of unsafe conditions.
Two hours into the blackout, SDG&E sent a warning to more than 17,000 customers: The
City of San Diego posted a boil water notice for several neighborhoods. City officials is-
sued the boil order based on reduced water pressure that allowed contaminated water
to infiltrate the system. Pump failure led to a loss of pressure in pipes. The power outage
caused several sewage pumping stations to go offline, releasing millions of gallons of
sewage into lagoons and waterways.
One pump station started overflowing after losing power and spilled sewage into Los
Penasquitos Lagoon and emptying into the ocean at Torrey Pines State Beach. The spill
stopped 3-1/2 hours later when power was restored. A second pump station failed dur-
ing the outage and discharged sewage that closed beaches from La Jolla to Solana Beach,
and along the Silver Strand south of Coronado. In addition about 120,000 gallons spilled
into the Sweetwater River from a pump station near Interstate 5 and state Route 54 and
an even larger spill south of the Mexican border, where Baja California officials reported
a pump station lost power and sent 3.8 million gallons of sewage into the Tijuana River.
When the power went out, two city sewage pump stations failed because they each
relied on electrical feeds from two separate San Diego Gas & Electric substations and
did not have onsite generators. Overall, 2.6 million gallons of sewage spilled in Los Pe-
nasquitos Creek and 870,000 gallons were released into the Sweetwater River and ulti-
mately to San Diego Bay.
The power outage affected about 10 percent of the city's water customers, the result
of not having emergency generators at each of the pump stations. Without electricity to
power the city water pumps and water purification plants, many individuals lost access
to clean drinking water.
The Northeast Blackout
Many issues observed in the San Diego outage of 2011 were also apparent in the August
2003 Northeast blackout. During this blackout, 50 million people in the Northeastern