Facing a future where extreme weather events are more common, cities on the East Coast are building up their resiliency to power outages.
At-risk cities, especially those on the East Coast that haven’t historically had to prepare for hurricane-induced problems, are trying to improve their infrastructure and emergency plans to prevent power outages.
A recent analysis from Johns Hopkins University ranked Philadelphia as the second most likely city in the United States to experience more power outages.
“If I’m mayor of Miami, we know about hurricanes, we know about outages and our system has been adapted for it,” said Seth Guikema, an assistant professor of geography and environmental engineering at Hopkins. “But if I’m mayor of Philadelphia, I might say, ‘Whoa, we need to be doing more about this.’”
And it is.
While city officials don’t oversee the local power grid, they’ve started creating contingency plans for what every city office must do in the case of a power outage, according to Adam Agalloco, Philadelphia’s energy conservation coordinator. In addition, the Office of Emergency Management worked on a local energy access plan to coordinate widespread emergency response.