Tue 18 Aug 2020 20.32 EDT
First published on Tue 18 Aug 2020 19.59 EDT
California’s governor has declared a state of emergency as the state battles dozens of wildfires amid a historic heatwave.
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Fires of varying size are currently burning across the state including in Sonoma, San Mateo, Napa, Butte, Nevada and Monterey counties. Evacuations were in effect or growing in the Napa county wine country north of San Francisco Bay, near Salinas in Monterey county, around Oroville Dam north of Sacramento and near the Nevada state line north of Lake Tahoe.
Several fires had been sparked by lightening strikes during unusual thunderstorms prompted by the extreme heatwave, which has sent temperatures soaring into the triple digits.
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In southern California, evacuations continued for a week-old fire in the mountains of northern Los Angeles county. Dynamic weather churned up thunderstorms bringing the double threat of more lightning-sparked fires and flash floods.
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Meanwhile, California’s power grid operators are under pressure to avoid more power blackouts as an ongoing heat wave stresses the electrical system. Thousands lost electricity over the weekend as the system strained under high demand, a situation Newsom described as “unacceptable”.
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Pleas for people to leave their air conditioners at higher temperatures and avoid using washing machines and other major appliances seemed to have worked. “Thank you for conserving,” California ISO said in a tweet.
However, grid managers warned that the threat of outages remained as temperatures were expected to hit triple digits again in many areas of the state. The National Weather Service said it may take until Friday or Saturday before excess heat watches and warnings ease.
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“What we have is a situation where the entire region is more than hot, it’s extremely hot,” said Steve Berberich, California ISO’s president and CEO. “We can’t get the energy that we would normally get from out of state because it’s being used to serve loads natively. That would probably account for another 4,000 to 5,000 megawatts and could have very well have closed the gap.”
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tags: extreme weather, severe weather,
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