ALSO IN THE NORTH, BUT DUE TO COLD, NOT TO HEAT.

POWER FAILURES AND CASUALTIES: ALSO IN THE US

Us inhabitants of greater Buenos Aires city, Argentina, are going through a nightmare of power failures due to overconsumption of electricity amidst and unusually severe and prolongued Christmas heat wave. While on the northern side of the Globe, tens of thousands of people were left without electricity on Christmas day due to severe snowstorms and a number of casualties occurred due to toxic carbon monoxyde coming from generators used to light and heat homes.

  Image: commons.wikimedia.org

POISON GAS KILLS EIGHT LEFT IN DARK AFTER STORM (from an article By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. in the US issue of The New York Times, Dec. 25, 2013, cited by AboveTheFold [AboveTheFold@newsletters.environmentalhealthnews.org]; Dec. 26, 2013)

With downed power lines forcing hundreds of thousands to spend Christmas without electricity, ice storms that raged through US’s Northeast and the Midwest and Canada continued to have a deadly effect as carbon monoxide given off by gasoline-powered generators killed three Americans and five Canadians, officials said.

In Maine and Vermont, where state authorities described the ice storm as the worst since 1998, there were no deaths from falling tree limbs or fallen power lines. But each state reported one death from carbon monoxide from a generator run after power was lost. The authorities reported a similar fatality in Michigan, and at least five people in eastern Canada were reported to have died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Many others in those places who used generators or grills to heat homes also fell ill from the toxic, but odorless, gas.

The weather has complicated repairs of power lines. Freezing temperatures have persisted across much of the northern United States, and the National Weather Service said more snow would fall in Michigan and Maine on Thursday. Yet despite cold that kept a thick layer of ice on transmission lines, power companies reported progress in restoring electricity. 

(A version of this article appears in print on December 26, 2013, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Poison Gas Kills Eight Left in Dark After Storm).

Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/us/carbon-monoxide-causes-fatalities-after-power-outage.html?_r=0

Comment from the blog’s Editor: Although power failures affected tens of thousands of customers in the US North Eastern states and Canada,some  power companies rushed over 1,800 workers many from out of the areas, and  24 hrs, after failure the numbers of customers without power were reduced 50% and falling rapidly in spite of the severe weather conditions.