Item 26 - Adoption of the City of Santa Ana Emergency Operations Plan

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City of Santa Ana Emergency Operations Plan Part 1 Basic Plan Historical Power Outages On January 17, 2001, CA ISO declared a Stage 3 Emergency as a result of the California energy crisis caused by deregulation, manipulations and price-fixing in the power supply market (the Enron scandal). Rotating outages were instituted around the San Francisco Bay Area by Pacific Gas & Electric, affecting several hundred thousand energy consumers, and these were repeated again the following day. On March 19 and 20, expanded rotating outages affected 1.5 million consumers throughout the state. On August 14, 2003, on a very hot afternoon, several sagging power lines in northern Ohio came into contact with tree branches and shut down. This would normally trigger an alarm system and action by electrical operators, but the alarm system failed. As a result, more and more electricity was surging into smaller and smaller portions of the grid, triggering a cascade of failures and circuit shutdowns. The blackout eventually became the second largest power outage in history, cascading through eight northeastern and Midwestern states and Ontario, Canada, affecting 45 million Americans and 10 million Canadians. Thousands of people were stranded by the shutdown of mass transit operators, thousands more had to be rescued from elevators and underground subway trains, airline flights throughout the nation were cancelled or delayed due to airport shutdowns in the affected region, and many persons required medical treatment for heat -related illnesses. Some power was restored by 11:00 PM but many were left without power until the next morning. On the afternoon of September 8, 2011, human error in an Arizona power plant triggered an 11-minute disturbance on five separate power grids throughout the southwest, leading to cascading outages throughout Arizona, southern California (including the SDG & E service area in southern Orange County) and western Mexico and affecting nearly 7 million customers for up to 12 hours. The outage occurred near rush hour on a hot day, snarling traffic throughout the region for hours. Schools and businesses closed and millions went without air conditioning on a hot afternoon. Hundreds of motorists stranded in traffic began to run out of gas and gas stations could not pump gas without power. Water and sewage stations lost power, disrupting water supply and causing sewage spills, unsafe drinking water and beach closures. m