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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

Add Topics: Techonomics Science

Massive California Power Outage Triggers Chaos in Science Labs [nature.com]:

Researchers without access to backup power scramble to save invaluable specimens and expensive reagents.

California’s largest utility company shut off power to more than a million people across the northern part of the state on 9 and 10 October. The outage sent scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, scrambling to save specimens and experiments.

The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), based in San Francisco, California, planned the outages to reduce the risk of wildfires. [...]The company has said that the power outage could last several days, frustrating residents — including some researchers.

“Our federal grants require campus to have facilities to support our work when the damn power goes out. It’s ridiculous,” tweeted [twitter.com] Noah Whiteman, an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley. The university cancelled classes on 9 and 10 October in light of the power outage, and told faculty members not to come to campus.

The neighbouring Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) closed its main site on 10 October. It will remain shuttered until further notice, according to a notice on the LBNL website [lbl.gov]. Officials estimate the earliest they could reopen the lab is 14 October.

Many labs at UC Berkeley lack reliable back-up power. Some researchers are taking drastic measures to preserve samples and supplies that require refrigeration. James Olzmann, a metabolic researcher at Berkeley, loaded his lab’s freezers onto trucks [twitter.com] on 9 October and moved them to facilities at the nearby University of California, San Francisco, which still has power.

Jessica Lyons, a molecular biologist at UC Berkeley, says that each lab in her building has a single outlet that is connected to an emergency power system. The main freezer in Lyons' lab, which keeps specimens at -80 °C, is plugged into that outlet. Lyons and her colleagues stocked the other freezers in their lab with dry ice on 8 October after being warned of the impending outages, to keep things cool.

“For any scientist, the bottom line is are all of the freezers getting power right now, or are they not,” she says. “I actually don’t know the answer to that right now, and they keep telling us not to come in.”

I'd not thought of interrupted research when I first learned of PG&E's planned outages. What other "unexpected" venues would be dramatically affected? Sperm banks are obvious now that I think of refrigeration issues. What light-sensitive activities would now be stymied with the power out? What about supporting research animals? There's a lot more than meets the eye.

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