From the NBC news:
Stanford University cancelled summer session classes Wednesday following ongoing power outages in the area.<p>According to the university, the power outages were a consequence of the Edgewood Fire burning in San Mateo County.<p>"Due to yesterday’s fire in the Emerald Hills area, the main Stanford campus lost the power supplied by PG&E’s main transmission line to the campus. PG&E is providing a limited supply of power through a secondary line, but it falls far short of the normal needs of the campus," the university said in a statement.<p>"This limited supply is being used to maintain cooling for the hospital and other critical infrastructure on campus.
Am a Stanford PhD Student, can confirm this is kind of a big deal. At 2 30 yesterday I was in the middle of a zoom call in the CS building, and suddenly the lights went off (except emergency lights)and wifi died. I walked 25 over to my place on campus, and likewise no power or wifi. Some common spaces do have light via backup gas powered generators, though.<p>Pretty crazy it's already been 24 hours and it might go on for days, and hard not to feel this is a portent of more such disruptions to come as summers will keep getting higher and higher peak temperatures over the coming decades...
Stanford says it has been on "stage 4c chilled water curtailment" since yesterday afternoon. Stage 4c chilled water users are characterized as [0]:<p>>Building spaces with the following characteristics: Significant safety concern, Non reproducible, reproducible (long duration), Non recoverable, Laser Labs and Wet Labs, MRI, High dollar, Long Duration, Campus Data Center/ECH.<p>That sounds bad.<p>[0] <a href="https://lbre.stanford.edu/sites/lbre-production/files/stanford_chilled_water_curtailment_guide_june21_update.docx.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://lbre.stanford.edu/sites/lbre-production/files/stanfo...</a>
Oh, one of the leading academic institutions of the leading industry nation of the world has no electricity?<p>A problem with sustainability possibly? On various levels I'd say.<p>The Roman Empire fell and history will repeat itself. Not necessarily during our lifetime, but good news from the US seem to have become rare during the last 10-20 years.