Preventative Scapegoating

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​​Report - Storms actually: How BC Hydro is preparing for increasing holiday storms

Headline - New data shows, over the past five years storms during the ‘holiday season’ timeframe of mid-December to mid-January are steadily getting stronger and more frequent in B.C., mostly because of the changing climate.

This information was released the week before Christmas 2022. Climate scapegoating in hindsight is not new, but influencing public sentiment just in case, is novel. The twist is using the number of affected customers, rather than weather severity, as the metric for the claim that current storms (2017-2022) are now 500% more damaging. By limiting comparison to just the recent past (2012-2017) rather than the full weather record, they avoid discussion of more destructive storms that have taken place long ago.

​The most recent outage discussed in the report happened on January 6, 2022, impacting 180,000 customers. Records at Vancouver Airport (YVR) show that the temperature hovered around zero Celsius, 12 cm of snow fell, and peak wind gusts were just 38 kph that day. If this is all it takes to knockout power to so many, Metro Vancouver has a pretty vulnerable grid.

Another holiday storm on December 20, 2018, affected 750,000 customers and is described as the most damaging storm in BC Hydro's history. Peak winds at YVR reached 91 kph. Although seven other holiday storms dating back to 1957 had higher wind gusts, these do not fall within the report's narrow scope. Beyond the wind, Hydro adds that trees were destabilized due to weakened soil because more than 400 millimetres of rain fell in some areas in the week before the storm. However, December 13 -19, 2018 records, reviewed for a wide geographic range of Lower Mainland weather stations, show that the highest precipitation amounts fell in rainy Port Moody with a week-long total of only 125.5 mm. Where did the 400+ mm deluge take place?

A CBC news story put a price tag on this December 2018 most damaging storm in BC Hydro’s history as having caused $37 million in damages. But dwarfing that event by cost and mortality measurement, another earlier CBC news retrospective discussed the impact of Typhoon Freda in October 1962, saying: According to BC Hydro, the storm caused today's (2016) equivalent of more than $600 million in damages and seven storm-related deaths. At its peak at 11 p.m. PT, winds reached 145 km/h. Why isn't Typhoon Freda the most damaging storm in BC Hydro's history? Fewer customers back then = less damaging?

Climate is the long-term experience of weather for any area, and Environment Canada uses 30 year periods to quantify the Climate Norms for the nation’s weather stations. Comparing the last five years against the previous five benign ones is simply cherry-picking. If the same comparison period was used for temperature it would show that Metro Vancouver has been cooling in the last 5 years, and this would be inconvenient to BC Hydro’s CO2-causes-global-warming campaign.
  
Why was the Storms actually report produced? The only credible explanation is Preventative Scapegoating. Like any bureaucracy charged with infrastructure management, BC Hydro wants to offload responsibility for power failure onto something out of their control. In this regard, they must believe that duping the customer is ok given that they are providing community safety warnings along with the deception. Almost half of all blackouts in BC are not weather related but by pre-establishing public belief that Climate Change is causing the problem, the electricity utility will get less customer flack when the next outage takes place for whatever reason.