Follow-up from the Power Outage in San Diego

Last Thursday, the southwest US learned that the electrical power grid is a lot more fragile than anybody, including executives of major utilities, ever suspected. When a worker in Yuma, Arizona tried to replace a faulty transmission line, a blackout shot South into Mexico, North to Palm Springs and West all the way to San Diego, putting four million people in the dark for 12 hours or more. Professor Steve Erie directs the program on Urban Studies and Planning at UC San Diego. His latest book is Paradise Plundered: Fiscal Crisis and Governance Failures in San Diego.