By Vivian Ho, The Guardian, October 11, 2019
Deanne Mediati learned of northern California’s massive power shutoff when her husband shook her awake at 3.30 in the morning on Wednesday. “Honey, the power is out,” he told her. “You’re not breathing.”
Mediati, 59, has hypoxia and requires an oxygen concentrator to breathe when she sleeps. Like everything else running on electricity in 600,000 California homes and businesses this week, her oxygen concentrator stopped working when the country’s largest utility company cut power to an unprecedented swath of the state as a preventive measure against wildfires.
In a state gripped by climate crisis, where the biggest utility was found at fault in two of the deadliest wildfires in recent history, these preventive shutoffs are set to become the new normal. But the impacts of these power cuts are being disproportionately borne by the physically vulnerable, disability rights advocates said.
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