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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDrought caused an Omaha street to erupt in fireballs
from Grist:
Drought caused an Omaha street to erupt in fireballs
By Jess Zimmerman
An electrical fire in the Omaha, Neb. sewer system sent gouts of flame shooting out of manholes on Sunday, and knocked out power to the citys downtown area. There are a lot of potential reasons for a sewer fire electrical problems, too many farts, angry mutants. But in this case, we can blame it partially on climate change.
As Brian Merchant points out at Vice, the drought conditions in Nebraska set the stage for the disaster:
Its been dry, unusually dry, and with the moisture weve (most recently) had, Omaha Public Power District vice president Tim Burke told a local Fox news team, weve probably had some moisture get into cable or tape, something like that could have created the outage. Thats what our crews are so good about doing. He believes that the fire started underground with a failure in their electrical equipment.
Scientists are being unusually non-weaselly about connecting this drought to climate change. So Omahas extraordinarily dry conditions, which made this fire more likely, are pretty definitely the result of all our up-fuckery of the planet. ...................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://grist.org/list/drought-caused-an-omaha-street-to-erupt-in-fireballs/
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Drought caused an Omaha street to erupt in fireballs (Original Post)
marmar
Jan 2013
OP
Berlum
(7,044 posts)1. Chalk up another one for the Mayans
progressoid
(49,990 posts)2. A transformer exploded.
Not to diminish our drought conditions or global warming, but it seems this was a mechanical failure.
ashling
(25,771 posts)3. How many, specifically ?
There are a lot of potential reasons for a sewer fire electrical problems, too many farts, angry mutants.