Flu Pandemic Could Cause Blackouts

Kennedy Maize

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Protecting Workers Who Provide the Fuel

What to do? The CIDRAP report suggests four steps that industry and government can take to prepare for the remote, but potentially catastrophic, event of a flu pandemic:

Pile up coal at the power plant. What coal plants now accumulate in anticipation of peak loads should become the floor for coal plant inventories. Inventory, of course, is expensive, and state regulators should allow utilities to recover costs of the higher inventories in rates. This plan could be a tough sell in today’s economic climate. In a press release, Osterholm said, “I realize that you can’t ignore the realities of this historic financial crisis, but if we don’t address these issues, we’ll pay a very heavy price at the time of the next pandemic.”
Put miners and supporting personnel at the top of the list for pandemic responses. The U.S. government, says the report, “should assume primary responsibility for ensuring that coal miners and their supporting infrastructure personnel have priority access to antiviral drugs, pandemic vaccines, and other critical products and services (e.g. critical pharmaceutical drugs and food).” The recommendation won a thumbs up from the United Miner Workers of America, the major labor union representing coal miners in the U.S. and Canada.
Plan ahead for coal supply chain disruptions. A flu pandemic, says the report, “could require responses beyond what is typically found in business continuity plans—and not currently addressed in national and state disaster management plans.”
Look at strategies for responding to service interruptions. “Adverse weather and equipment failures are the most common causes of electrical disruptions,” says the report. “Both will occur during a pandemic—in additional to probably fuel shortages.”

Institutions and individuals concerned with emergency response to flu pandemics targeted the Obama administration’s economic stimulus package as a way to fund their efforts, included in a larger, $16 billion package of public health spending measures. The Trust for America’s Health and the National Association of County and City Health Officials were leading the lobbying for the public health spending. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in early February spoke disparagingly of the flu pandemic spending as an example of items that have no real stimulus effect. Ultimately, according to CIDRAP, no pandemic response spending survived in the final bill that president Obama signed into law in late February

—Kennedy Maize is executive editor of MANAGING POWER.

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