Power outages have become increasingly common with a changing climate and aging electrical grid infrastructure. Given the centrality of electrical energy in our daily lives for tasks like cooking meals and heating one’s home, imbalances in electrical disruptions are inherently environmental justice and climate justice issues. 

Imbalances could be present in the exposure’s distribution, where for example, certain communities experience frequent outages. Imbalances could also be present in the exposure’s health impact, where for example, individuals relying on electricity-powered medical equipment or refrigerated medications could be adversely impacted after just a few hours without power. 

Our research group has used multiple data sources at county and sub-county levels to document the locations and populations experiencing disproportionate burdens from power outages.

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The 2021 Texas Power Crisis: Distribution, Duration, and Disparities

Published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, August 2022

In my first first-author paper I investigated power outage dynamics and issues of environmental justice in my home state of Texas during the 2021 Texas Power Crisis. We used both county-level power outage data and metrics of vulnerability and individual surveys and found that Black and Hispanic Texans were more likely to experience outages related to the winter storms. We also found that younger individuals and lower SES individuals were less likely to be prepared for the outages.

As such, the 2021 Texas Power Crisis proved not only that outages can be deadly but that medically vulnerable, socioeconomically vulnerable, and marginalized groups may be disproportionately impacted and less prepared. Large-scale outages are only expected to become more common in a changing climate that will bring more severe storms. In Texas, we pointed toward vulnerable regions and subpopulations that may need additional support in the context of power outages.

Furthering the work to understand disparities associated with power outages, in a monumental effort led by my colleague Vivian Do, this paper characterizes the burden of power outages, climate events, and social vulnerability for US counties nationwide.

Though county-level analyses are highly informative, outage disparities are likely most identifiable at sub-county scales. New York State collects power outage data statewide at a more granular (~zip code tabulation area) level, allowing us to investigate outage disparities further. In this paper, I paired hourly power outage data in electrical power operating localities (n = 1865) throughout NYS with urbanicity, CDC Social Vulnerability Index, and hourly weather (temperature, precipitation, wind speed, lightning strike, snowfall) data. We used these data to characterize the impact of extreme weather events on power outages from 2017-2020, while considering neighborhood vulnerability and urbanicity factors.

We found that 40% of all outages occurred after severe weather events. Using targeted maximum likelihood estimation, we found that the high vulnerability communities in New York City disproportionately experienced heat-, precipitation-, and wind-driven outages, whereas in rural New York, high vulnerability communities experienced the longest durations of precipitation- and snow-driven outages. We also identified specific regions including eastern Queens, upper Manhattan and the Bronx of NYC, the Hudson Valley,  and Adirondack regions that were more burdened with severe weather-driven outages.

Assessing the burden of electrical, elevator, heat, hot water, and water service interruptions in New York City public housing

Under review at Lancet Planetary Health

The finest spatiotemporal power outage data we obtained came from the New York City Housing Authority, which houses 500,000+ public housing residents in New York City. Despite housing a population with a high prevalence of chronic conditions that could be exacerbated by service interruptions (elevator, electric, heat, hot water, and water outage), the NYCHA fails to consistently provide these critical services. In the aftermath of several scandals, NYCHA entered into a 2019 agreement with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that required the posting of real-time data on outages publicly. 

I scraped, tidied, and compiled this building-level outage data and paired it with NYC buildings shapefiles as well as demographic and meteorological sources to comprehensively understand the burden of these outages. Our results demonstrated that (1) outages often exceeded health-relevant restoration windows, such as 8 hours for electrical interruptions; (2) senior developments (exclusively residents 62+) had the longest duration of elevator, heat, and hot water outages; and (3) outages sometimes overlapped with temperature extremes – potentially increasing their threat to health. We identified the individual developments where this overlap occurred most frequently. To further track outages and their health implications among NYCHA residents, we also provide a continually updated public dashboard for visualization and download of the service interruption data in an analysis-ready format. 

In addition to understanding regions vulnerable to outages, our research group is interested in identifying who is vulnerable when the power goes out. Recognizing that the health impacts of outages are largely understudied in children, my colleague, Alex Northrop, led an analysis finding positive associations between power outages and unintentional injury hospitalizations.

Electrical power outages and asthma-related emergency department visits in NYC, 2019-2020 

In preparation

Now that I had tidied the NYCHA outage data, I could use it to investigate the health implications of outages with minimal exposure misclassification. In tandem, we could use theNYC-wide locality data to triangulate our results. Existing power outage research links power outages to the exacerbation of respiratory conditions, but the health consequences of asthmatics –who might be vulnerable to heat, cold, or other outage-related stressors – remains underexplored. 

In these two analyses, we found positive associations between power outages and asthma ED visits, highlighting the importance of considering asthmatics among those vulnerable when the power goes out.

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