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Wildfire threatening the power grid that supplies San Francisco | Better HN

Wildfire threatening the power grid that supplies San Francisco (opens in new tab)

(npr.org)

141 pointsmpchlets12y ago61 comments

61 comments

001sky12y ago

For anyone wondering what the relationship between wildfires in Yosemite and San Francisco proper, its worth a small comment. California's Sierra Nevada range is a couple hours east of SF. These mountains include the highest points in the continental US. Trapping most of the water from the east-west jet stream. The sierras hold massive amounts of high-quality water, which runs out of the non-porous terrain of the high-alpine regions. The sierras are something of a geological monolith, not unlike a giant bathub [1]. SF taps into this water source at a dam on the West; LA taps into it on the East (LA acqueduct). This fire is threatening the a region about an hour or so north of Yosemite Valley, and west of Tuolome Meadows, where some critical infrastucure resides.[2]

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a2/Sierra_nevada...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Shaughnessy_Dam_%28Califor...

hga12y ago

Yikes! From the article:

"The Associated Press says San Francisco gets 85 percent of its water from the Yosemite-area Hetch Hetchy reservoir that is about 4 miles from the fire."

The fire is well established now, and in addition to the threat to the water supply they've already had to shut down electric transmission lines.

hkmurakami12y ago

I remember talking to one of the rangers at Yosemite, near one of the natural lakes that eventually supply water to SF. I remember him saying that he tells visitors who go answer nature's call at the lake to think twice, since they're going to be drinking this very water soon.

fnordfnordfnord12y ago

What did he say about drinking fish shit? And the effluent of every other critter in the park?

cdash12y ago

Just as astronauts on the ISS drink their own piss, it is nothing but in our minds.

mapt12y ago

Urination is a relatively low-impact activity on a water supply. Defecation, on the other hand, tends to cause a decent variety of diarrheal illnesses unless the water treatment facility is quite good - something that may not be accurate for something designed for sterile snow runoff. The water here is not just being drunk, but going on fresh produce as well, so you can't rely on purely municipal filtering.

bavcyc12y ago

The SF water supply has some interesting politics:

https://www.baycitizen.org/news/water/raise-rent-hetch-hetch...

nknighthb12y ago

Water is intensely political pretty much everywhere but rainforests, and at all levels of government. However, unless you're directly involved, you don't hear about it because it can't normally be used as a political football. Your opinion on any particular water dispute will have nothing to do with your political views or party affiliation, it's mostly a product of geographic location or industry, and no politician who happens to represent both parties wants to take sides. (And any politician who represents only one side will invariably adopt that side's position.)

(Incidentally, in the modern era, the US Supreme Court's original jurisdiction case load is made up almost entirely of states suing one another over either water rights or boundary disputes based on rivers.)

hga12y ago

I've read that when California's major water systems were built long ago there were explicit compacts between the urban and agricultural regions. The latter now see various actions as breaking that.

agwa12y ago

This article is vague (and overly alarmist); other sources I have read indicate that the threat is to SF's municipal power company, which provides power primarily to municipal buildings (including, most notably, SFO!). The vast majority of people in SF and the Bay Area get their power from PG&E, which has power plants in many more places than just Yosemite.

More info: http://www.sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=391

tomsaffell12y ago

Yes, the NPR article is alarmist, verging on irresponsible.

A few facts, with sources:

- The water coming out of Hetchy Hetchy is still well within the 'usable' range [1]

- The total loss of power is 293 MW (Holm and Kirkwood), which is a tiny percentage of the power generated in CA [1,2]

- The SF PUC is already dealing with the loss of those 293 MW: San Francisco is making up the difference in power generation by accessing power in an existing power bank and purchasing power on the open market. [1]

- PG&E is reporting no problems in their network (at 10:20 PT) [3]

Keep calm, carry on. Perhaps take it as an opportunity to turn of the lights you're not using, like you should every day ;)

1. http://www.sfwater.org/index.aspx?page=711 (see chart) 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Calif... 3. http://www.pge.com/en/myhome/customerservice/energystatus/gr...

ChuckMcM12y ago

Its only alarmist if it doesn't get worse :-) Seriously though, alarmist or not, its serious. This fire is growing and not contained. There exists a non-zero chance of it creating a serious impact into the available clean water supply. And this is to a county not exactly known for its fiscal responsibility or ability to respond well to crisis.

larrys12y ago

To that point nothing about it on either news.google.com or the front of the NYT or WSJ (but there is something about graphene being a wonder material that is igniting a patent frenzy.)

Stratoscope12y ago

Hetch Hetchy water doesn't just go to San Francisco. Two-thirds of it goes to other cities and towns on the Peninsula, the South Bay, and in Alameda County. In particular, many cities that the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct runs through get some of the water, because voter approval in those cities was part of the campaign to get the project built.

For example, 74% of Mountain View's water comes from Hetch Hetchy. (They get 87% of their water from the SF Public Utilities Commission, and 85% of that comes from Hetch Hetchy.) [1]

Daly City, San Bruno, and South San Francisco currently get 67% of their water from SFPUC and the rest from local aquifers, with a project in the works to increase the SFPUC portion to 100%. [2]

Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and other towns also rely on it, although I don't know the percentages.

Many have seen the pipeline that crosses the Bay between the Dumbarton Bridge and the old railroad bridge.

There are also a number places in the Peninsula and South Bay where you can see parts of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct, either the pipes themselves or the above-ground access hatches where the pipe is underground. These are white structures, often circular.

For example if you walk or run the Dish Trail at Stanford, you can see a number of these next to the northernmost part of the trail. This is part of the southern branch of the Aqueduct, which doesn't cross the Bay but cuts south through Milpitas, Sunnyvale, and Mountain View.

Several places where you see a residential street that is divided with a very wide grassy or dirt median, that's the Aqueduct: Sharon Heights Drive and Ivy Drive in Menlo Park are examples.

Along Edgewood Road near 280 there are a number of pipeline sections where it alternates between above-ground bridges and underground sections through those hills. The pipeline then parallels the Cordilleras Trail in the Pulgas Ridge Open Space Preserve where you can see some of the access structures.

On the other side of 280 on Cañada Road there is the famous Pulgas Water Temple [4], where you can really get a sense of how much water flows through the Aqueduct.

For the obsessively curious like me, several years ago I traced the path of the southern branch of the Aqueduct and made a KML file marking some of the visible structures. [3] Someone else had made a similar file for the northern branch but I don't know where to find that now.

[1]: http://www.mountainview.gov/city_hall/public_works/water_con...

[2]: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/three-peninsula-citie...

[3]: http://mg.to/earth/hetchy.kml

[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulgas_Water_Temple

Stratoscope12y ago

I forgot to add... Here's a Street View from Ivy Drive in Menlo Park that happened to be taken during a pipeline addition/reconstruction. They set out the pipe sections in the street median before digging to lay them in place. These are some big pipes!

https://www.google.com/maps?ll=37.47579%2C-122.1629239999999...

(You may need to zoom out; I couldn't figure out how to save a URL with the correct zoom level.)

fnordfnordfnord12y ago

Looks like a good case for decentralization of the power grid; a good application for a small modular LFTR[1] (or similar) power units. As a bonus, you won't need to spoil the scenery with HV transmission lines anymore.

[1] Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor

NIL812y ago

Interesting concept. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is how to protect these units from the bad guys.

Tcepsa12y ago

If you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't threaten our electrical system," that's kind of the point of having a decentralized system of smaller reactors: if one or two get sabotaged, others in the system can easily pick up the slack.

If you mean "protect these units from bad guys so they don't steal the thorium and weaponize it," that's one of the great things about thorium reactors: thorium and its byproducts are very hard to weaponize. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reacto...

hga12y ago

There are two issues here, one of which strongly cuts against distributing nuclear power that broadly:

If you have a lot of units, the loss of one or a few has limited effects, vs. taking out a few big baseline power plants and/or major transmission nodes.

What's the local/regional cost if someone takes out a node with a sufficiently big shaped charge?

argumentum12y ago

I'd hope the first thing to come to mind is how to build the technology. Once it's built, we can start worrying about how to protect it .. why protect something that doesn't exist?

joering212y ago

The system continues to be broken. Hundreds of millions going into building lethal drones to deploy to Afganistan/ME; some major american cities are on a brink of releasing police surveillance drones en masse (its constitution/law-questionable now), and yet we do not have drones to fight fire.

I am pretty sure there are lot of challenges within the project, but I can envision drones working together to connect each other and transport water to sprinkle it when needed without humans being endangered. I mean, if we achieved this [1], why not go further?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDyfGM35ekc

hga12y ago

Errrm, this translates into a "making large drones" problem. Which has a whole set of additional problems, e.g. what are you going to say to the survivors of a devastated neighborhood when a big drone with lots of water crashes into it?

I'm not saying its insurmountable, just that it's way beyond the current levels of both drone technology and acceptance.

joering212y ago

The biggest problem fighting fires are lethal to humans high temperatures and lack of easy access to places affected. Those two problems would be irrelevant to properly designed drones that can easy maneuver and are built from temperature-resistant materials.

Instead of huge drone carrying water (we already have planes to do that now), I was envision a network of connected drones that "pass by" the water as they hover in the line all the way from water pool to fireplace. The video attached previously shows you group of drones perfectly communicating with each other.

I never said it was easy to develop, but I have to disagree its something "way beyound the current levels" of technology. Further, the cost to design, develop and implement would be pennies comparing to an average damage of mid-size fire. Not the mention about life-loss.

nether12y ago

Isn't there a Google interview question for this?

tomjen312y ago

Damn. The powers that be better do something about this fast. SF is about one of the last places in the US to develop new things.

Heck just a temporary prolonged outage of Google alone would have huge negative consequences for the US (not to mention the world). Amazon AWS US west is in Northeren California. I wonder how big the negative effect will be on just how many companies?

argumentum12y ago

The "City" of San Francisco (though it does contain a big chunk of the tech industry and houses many of it's employees) is not the whole "Silicon Valley".

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Y-Combinator, Stanford, Yahoo, etc are all located in the South Bay and (may or may not be, the article doesn't specify) affected by the fires.

jcl12y ago

Don't know about the power grid, but about half the water supply in Mountain View comes from local wells, so it would not be as affected as SF, but part of the rest comes from Hetch Hetchy, so there could still be problems. Not sure if local resources get reallocated in emergencies.

http://www.valleywater.org/Services/CleanReliableWater.aspx

flomo12y ago

Most of the 'Silicon Valley' cities get at least some of their water from the Hetch Hetchy system.

This report is an economic scenario analysis, and estimates the probable effects on the Bay Area economy of a major failure of the San Francisco Public Utility Commission’s Hetch Hetchy water system,

http://www.bayeconfor.org/pdf/hetchhetchyfinal2.pdf (map on pg 4)

eropple12y ago

> SF is about one of the last places in the US to develop new things.

Don't believe your own hype. It's bad for you.

sliverstorm12y ago

This sort of thing is EXACTLY WHY both Google and Amazon have datacenters all over the world.

tomjen312y ago

Sure, except us west is only in NC and many businesses aren't likely to shift availability zones.

pedromorgan12y ago

Is there a sim where I can go an blow these places up in a simulator, eg anti terrorist training ?

zwp12y ago

If you mean "cyber-blow-up" there's https://www.sans.org/netwars/cybercity

I've no idea if it lives up to its own hype.

emiliobumachar12y ago

anti terrorist training? I suspect these simulators aren't more commonplace precisely because they may be accused of being training software for terrorists.

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