As a huge storm approached California on Wednesday, officials began ordering evacuations in a high-risk coastal area where mudslides killed 23 people in 2018, while residents elsewhere in the state scrambled to find sandbags, and braced themselves for flooding and power outages. California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency to allow for a quick response and to aid in cleanup from another powerful storm just days earlier. Dozens of flights were cancelled at the San Francisco International Airport, and South San Francisco schools preemptively cancelled Thursday classes. As the storm intensified, state officials warned residents in Northern California to stay off the roads. The first evacuations were ordered for those living in the burn scar areas of three recent wildfires in Santa Barbara County, where heavy rain is expected overnight, and could cause widespread flooding and unleash debris flows in several areas. Among them is the tony town of Montecito, home to many celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle. “We anticipate that this may be one of the most challenging and impactful series of storms to touch down in California in the last five years,” said Nancy Ward, the new director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. Officials asked drivers to stay off the roads unless absolutely necessary — and to stay informed by signing up for updates from emergency officials about downed trees and power lines, and flooding. In Northern California, a 25-mile (40-kilometer) stretch of Highway 101 was closed between the towns of Trinidad and Orick due to several downed trees. Before the storm arrives late Wednesday, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said people should evacuate the areas impacted by the Alisal Fire last year, the Cave Fire in 2019 and the devastating Thomas Fire in 2017, one of the largest in California history. On Jan. 9, 2018, massive torrents carrying huge boulders, mud and debris roared down coastal mountains, and through the town of Montecito to the shoreline, killing 23 people and destroying more than 100 homes. Among those killed were two children whose bodies were never found. Read more: 48 deaths reported in US from massive storm Montecito Fire Department Chief Kevin Taylor said Wednesday that homes near waterways are at the greatest risk. “What we’re talking about here is a lot of water coming off the top of the hills, coming down into the creeks and streams and as it comes down, it gains momentum and that’s what the initial danger is,” he said. Storms in the last 30 days have produced between 8 to 13 inches of rain, soaking coastal hills in Santa Barbara County. The current storm is projected to drop up to 10 inches of rain in the area, Taylor said. “This cumulative rain ... is what causes our risk,” he said. The storm, set to be in full force in Northern California by Wednesday evening, is one of three so-called atmospheric river storms in the last week to reach the drought-stricken state. Because the states' major reservoirs are at a record low from a dry three-year period, they have plenty of room to fill with more water from the impending storm, officials said. Still, trees are already stressed from years of limited rain. Now that the grounds are suddenly saturated and winds are heavy, trees are more likely to fall. That could cause widespread power outages or create flood hazards, said Karla Nemeth, director of the state’s Department of Water Resources. “We are in the middle of a flood emergency and also in the middle of a drought emergency,” she said during an emergency briefing. The storm comes days after a New Year’s Eve downpour led to the evacuations of people in rural Northern California communities and the rescue of several motorists from flooded roads. A few levees south of Sacramento were damaged. In the San Francisco Bay Area, 8,500 sandbags distributed by officials weren’t enough to reach demand Wednesday as forecasters warned of imminent flooding. The South San Francisco Unified School District announced classes for its 8,000 students would be canceled Thursday “out of an abundance of caution.” Heavy downpours accompanied by winds with gusts of up to 60 mph (96 kph) were expected later Wednesday and through Thursday, making driving conditions difficult, the National Weather Service said. In Southern California, the storm was expected to peak in intensity overnight, with Santa Barbara and Ventura counties likely to see the most rain, forecasters said. Read more: Wild winter storm envelops US, snarling Christmas travel Aaron Johnson, Pacific Gas & Electric regional vice president for the Bay Area, said the company has more than 3,000 employees working in crews of three to five people to assess damages to their equipment and restore power as soon as possible. Robert O’Neill, an insurance broker who lives and works just south of San Francisco, said he lined up to get sandbags for his garage and for a co-worker’s home to prepare for the storm. As president of Town & Country Insurance Services, he gave employees the option of working from home Wednesday, which many did, he said. He plans to leave the office early and head home where he has go-bags packed with clothes, medicine, electronic chargers and important papers. He has sleeping bags and three days’ worth of water, nuts and protein bars. “We’re in a big city, so we wouldn’t be too stranded too long, but you never know,” he said. The storms in California still aren’t enough to officially end the drought, now entering its fourth year. The U.S. Drought Monitor showed that most of the state is in severe to extreme drought. Elsewhere, in the Midwest, ice and heavy snow has taken a toll this week, closing down schools in Minnesota and western Wisconsin — and causing a jet to go off an icy taxiway after landing in a snowstorm in Minneapolis. No passengers were injured, Delta airlines said. To the south, a possible tornado damaged homes, downed trees and flipped a vehicle on its side in Montgomery, Alabama, early Wednesday. Christina Thornton, director of the Montgomery Emergency Management Agency, said radar indicated a possible, but unconfirmed, tornado. The storm had extremely high winds and moved through the area before dawn, she said. Staff from the National Weather Service's Chicago office planned to survey storm damage on Wednesday following at least six tornados, the largest number of rare January tornadoes recorded in the state since 1989.

California's chance of power outages will grow in the coming days, as the state prepares to enter the most brutal stretch yet of an ongoing heat wave, officials said Sunday. Energy demand is expected to outpace supply starting Monday evening, and predictions for Tuesday show the state rivaling its all-time high for electricity demand, said Elliot Mainzer, president and chief executive officer of the California Independent System Operator. “This is about to get significantly more intense,” Mainzer told reporters. The system operator is in charge of managing and maintaining reliability on the electric grid, a challenging job during hot weather when energy demand soars as people crank up their air conditioners. Read: California wildfires prompt evacuations amid heat wave Grid managers have several options available before power outages, like tapping backup generators, buying more power from other states and using so-called demand response programs, where people are paid to use less energy. But keeping the lights on will also require Californians to continue conserving as they have been, even as temperatures rise. Most of California’s 39 million people are facing extremely hot weather. Temperatures in the Central Valley are expected to be as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 degrees Celsius) for several days. In Los Angeles, meanwhile, temperatures topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), unusually warm temperatures for September. Energy officials and power companies have been urging people since Wednesday to use less power from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. by keeping air conditioners at 78 degrees Fahrenheit (25.5 degrees Celsius) or higher and avoiding using major appliances like ovens and dishwashers. Those so-called flex alerts have allowed the grid operator to keep the lights on so far. On Saturday night, the state used about 44,000 megawatts of electricity, Mainzer said. By Tuesday, that's supposed to ramp up to more than 50,000 megawatts, nearing record levels of energy use set in 2006. But the state would rather curb demand to avoid that number than test the power grid's capability to respond. “Our goal is to make sure that we do not reach that number," Mainzer said. During the day, California's energy grid runs on a mix of mostly solar and natural gas, as well as some imports of power from other states. But solar power begins to fall off during the late afternoon and into the evening, which is the hottest time of day in some parts of the state. Read: Spain: 10 injured while leaving stopped train near wildfire Meanwhile, some of the aging natural gas plants that California relies on for backup power aren't as reliable in hot weather. As of Sunday afternoon, three of the state's coastal power plants were experiencing partial outages, though they make up just a small fraction of the state's supply, officials said. At the same time, some hydropower resources are limited due to drought. Dry conditions and heat are hitting California as the state heads into what traditionally is the worst of the fire season, with large fires already burning and turning deadly. Scientists say climate change has made the West warmer and drier over the last three decades and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. Several hundred thousand Californians lost power in rolling blackouts in August 2020 amid hot weather. The state avoided a similar scenario last summer. Newsom on Friday signed legislation potentially allowing the state's last remaining nuclear plant to stay open beyond its planned 2025 closure in order to ensure more power for the energy grid. On Sunday evening, nuclear power accounted for about 5% of California's energy supply.

BNP will stage demonstrations across the country to protest against the ongoing load-shedding and mismanagement in the power and energy sector. BNP Secretary General Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir announced the three-day protest programme at a press conference at BNP Chairperson’s Gulshan office. As part of the programmes, BNP’s Dhaka north city unit will stage a demonstration on July 29 while Dhaka south city unit on July 30. All other metropolitan cities will observe the same programmes on the same days. Besides, BNP’s all district units will also stage demonstrations on July 31. Read: Govt promoting officials involved in enforced disappearance: BNP After that, the party will also stage demonstrations at the upazila level on the same issue. BNP standing committee members worked out the programmes at a virtual meeting on Monday. The meeting urged the government to step down admitting its failure to ensure the supply of electricity and energy. Fakhrul said their meeting voiced concern that load-shedding for two-three hours in cities and five-six hours in rural areas has made public life miserable. It also observed that setting up power plants to generate electricity without ensuring energy supply has compounded the problem. “The government has taken the power and energy sector to the path of darkness just out of its greed to plunder public money through corruption.” The BNP policymakers think the power outages are badly affecting the production in industry and agriculture alongside adversely affecting the economy. Fakhrul said they will come up with elaborate information about corruption, anomalies and mismanagement in the power and energy sector at a press conference very soon.

Hurricane Ida knocked out power to all of New Orleans and inundated coastal Louisiana communities on a deadly path through the Gulf Coast that was still unfolding Monday, promising more destruction. The heavy rain and storm surge has already had a catastrophic impact along the southeast coast of Louisiana, and life-threatening floods along rivers was continuing well inland as torrential rain kept falling, forecast to dump as much as two feet in places as Ida’s center moved over Mississippi. Ida made landfall on the same day 16 years earlier that Hurricane Katrina ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi, and its 150 mph (230 kph) winds tied it for the fifth-strongest hurricane to ever hit the mainland. It was already blamed for on death, someone hit by a falling tree in Prairieville, outside Baton Rouge, deputies with the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office confirmed on Sunday. The power outage in New Orleans, meanwhile, heightened the city’s vulnerability to flooding and left hundreds of thousands of people without air conditioning and refrigeration in sweltering summer heat. Read: No cash or gas to run from Ida: ‘We can’t afford to leave’ The 911 system in Orleans Parish also experienced technical difficulties early Monday. Anyone needing emergency assistance was urged to go to their nearest fire station or approach their nearest officer, the New Orleans Emergency Communications Center tweeted. Ida finally became a tropical storm again 16 hours after making landfall in Louisiana as a Category 4 hurricane. Its top sustained wind were 60 mph (97 kph) early Monday, and forecasters said it would rapidly weaken throughout the morning while still dumping torrential rain over a large area. The storm was centered about 95 miles (155 kilometers) south-southwest of Jackson, Mississippi, moving north at 8 mph (13 kmh). As Ida made landfall Sunday, the rising ocean swamped the barrier island of Grand Isle and roofs on buildings around Port Fourchon blew off. The hurricane then churned through the far southern Louisiana wetlands, threatening the more than 2 million people living in and around New Orleans and Baton Rouge. In Baton Rouge, 27-year-old Robert Owens watched the sky in his neighborhood light up as transformers blew up all around him. “Never in my life have I encountered something this major,” he said as giant gusts rattled his home’s windows. Significant flooding was reported late Sunday night in LaPlace, a community adjacent to Lake Pontchartrain, meteorologists in New Orleans said. Many people took to social media, pleading for boat rescues as the water rose. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said rescue crews would not be able to immediately help those who were stranded as the storm raged. And he warned his state to brace for potentially weeks of recovery. “Many, many people are going to be tested in ways that we can only imagine today,” the governor told a news conference Sunday. But he added, “There is always light after darkness, and I can assure you we are going to get through this.” Read:1st death from Hurricane Ida; power out across New Orleans The entire city of New Orleans late Sunday was without power, according to city officials. The city’s power supplier — Entergy — confirmed that the only power in the city was coming from generators, the city’s Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness said on Twitter. The message included a screenshot that cited “catastrophic transmission damage” for the power failure. The city relies on Entergy for backup power for the pumps that remove storm water from city streets. Rain from Ida is expected to test that pump system. Overall, more than 1 million customers in Louisiana were without power, and another 80,000 or so in Mississippi were in the dark, according to PowerOutage.US, which tracks outages nationwide. In New Orleans, wind tore at awnings and caused buildings to sway and water to spill out of Lake Pontchartrain. The Coast Guard office there received more than a dozen reports of breakaway barges, said Petty Officer Gabriel Wisdom. Officials said Ida’s swift intensification to a massive hurricane in just three days left no time to organize a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans’ 390,000 residents. In Lafitte, about 35 miles (55 kilometers) south of New Orleans, a loose barge struck a bridge, according to Jefferson Parish officials. And U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Ricky Boyette said engineers detected a “negative flow” on the Mississippi River as a result of storm surge. Ida was churning in one of the nation’s most important industrial corridors — home to a large number of petrochemical sites. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality was in contact with more than 1,500 oil refineries, chemical plants and other sensitive facilities and will respond to any reported pollution leaks or petroleum spills, agency spokesman Greg Langley said. Louisiana is also home to two nuclear power plants, one near New Orleans and another about 27 miles (about 43 kilometers) northwest of Baton Rouge. Read: Powerful Hurricane Ida closing in on Louisiana landfall The region getting Ida’s worst is also already reeling from a resurgence of COVID-19 infections due to low vaccination rates and the highly contagious delta variant. New Orleans hospitals planned to ride out the storm with their beds nearly full, as similarly stressed hospitals elsewhere had little room for evacuated patients. And shelters for those fleeing their homes carried an added risk of becoming flashpoints for new infections. Comparisons to the Aug. 29, 2005, landfall of Katrina weighed heavily on residents. Katrina was blamed for 1,800 deaths as it caused levee breaches and catastrophic flooding in New Orleans. Now facing Ida more than a decade and a half later, officials emphasized that the city’s levee system has been massively improved. President Joe Biden approved a major disaster declaration for Louisiana. He said Sunday the country was praying for the best for the state and would put its “full might behind the rescue and recovery” effort once the storm passes.

San Francisco, OCT 15 (AP/UNB) — California's top utility regulator blasted Pacific Gas and Electric on Monday for what she called "failures in execution" during the largest planned power outage in state history to avoid wildfires that she said, "created an unacceptable situation that should never be repeated."

San Francisco, OCT 12 (AP/UNB) — The lights were back on Friday for many of the nearly 2 million Northern California residents who lost electricity when the state's largest utility switched it off this week in an effort to prevent wildfires, as the first death linked to the outages was reported — a man who relied on oxygen.