[vondur]

From the NBC news: Stanford University cancelled summer session classes Wednesday following ongoing power outages in the area.

According to the university, the power outages were a consequence of the Edgewood Fire burning in San Mateo County.

"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.

"This limited supply is being used to maintain cooling for the hospital and other critical infrastructure on campus.

[crmd]

The PG&E grid isn’t designed properly if the failure of one transmission line causes an outage like this.

I live in New York City and pay some of the highest rates in the country for electricity, but over the past 10 years (including multiple hurricanes), I’ve had less than 10 minutes of downtime, and even that was only on one of three phases.

[akvadrako]

That's cheery picking the data though. NYC lost power for two days in 2003, just like everyone else who doesn't pay those high rates.

[bombcar]

If you got the best names in the business together, gave them billions of dollars, and told them to design a power grid to fail and cause forest fires, they'd fall embarrassingly short of whatever it is PG&E has created.

[throwoutway]

How so?