Earthquake alert app buys crucial time for California towns

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A new early warning system helped save lives as a severe earthquake struck the northern California coast Tuesday morning, officials told the Los Angeles Times. 

Two elderly people died in the violent quake and 12 were injured. Warnings arrived to about
3 million people just 10 seconds before severe shaking started, the Times reported. 

That was just enough time for many people to get on the ground or to someplace safe — even as the quake caved in home walls and knocked out power for thousands of residents.

“The system did operate as we had hoped, and that we’ve been working to design,” Mark Ghilarducci of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services told reporters, according to the Times. 

The ShakeAlert mobile app — a product of the U.S. Geological Survey — sends users who may be in danger a push notification advising them to “Drop, Cover, Hold on. Protect Yourself,” according to the newspaper.

The northern California earthquakes “may be the actual biggest event that we’ve had [for the system] so far,” Robert Degroot of the ShakeAlert operations team told the Times. 

“The system is doing exactly what it should be. This is actually a really big success for us,” Degroot added. 

But while warnings limited the loss of life, the quake still knocked out key bridges, water lines and power lines. 

More than 13,000 residents of Humboldt County, Calif., remain without electricity on Wednesday afternoon in the aftermath of a severe magnitude 6.4 earthquake — about 18 percent of those who lost power, according to tracking site PowerOutage.us.

And several small communities were relying on portable toilets and boiled or bottled water due to damage to drinking water, The Associated Press reported.

Welcome to Equilibrium, we’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. 

Today we’ll see why an incoming arctic storm could also come with a heightened risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, followed by a look at how California nursing homes may be unprepared to handle wildfire emergencies. Plus: Why those in the market for an EV may want to buy one very soon.

‘Bomb cyclone’ raises risk of carbon monoxide death

An incoming winter storm set to pummel the central U.S. could also raise the risk of carbon monoxide deaths, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) warned on Wednesday. 

Killing in minutes: The so-called “bomb cyclone” is expected to cause heavy snow, below-freezing temperatures and dangerous wind chills.

• Such conditions that could lead to power outages and increase the use of portable generators, according to the CPSC.
  
• “Portable generators create a risk of [carbon monoxide] poisoning that can kill in minutes,” CPSC said in a statement, which was also circulated prior to a storm last week.

Why is carbon monoxide so deadly? Carbon monoxide, also known as CO, is an “invisible killer” due to its colorless and odorless nature, the agency explained.

Exposed individuals may become unconscious prior to experiencing symptoms of nausea, dizziness and weakness — and sometimes death.

Weather update: The storm expected to cause these dangers is the result of a strong arctic high-pressure system “diving southward” toward the central Plains on Wednesday, the National Weather Service (NWS) reported.

• The intense winter storm will “produce a multitude of weather hazards” and generate “life-threatening wind chills.”
  
• Temperatures are poised to drop 20 or more degrees Fahrenheit within the span of just a few hours.

Happy holidays: “What better way to kick off the official start of astronomical winter than with numerous winter weather hazards impacting a majority of the nation,” the NWS stated.

• Wind chill hazards could plunge as low as -70 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the central High Plains.
  
• Meanwhile, widespread wind chills below zero could extend as far south as Texas. 

And the carbon monoxide connection? Those hazardous conditions are likely to lead to a surge in power outages and generator usages, which the CPSC reiterated could lead to a spike in carbon monoxide poisoning events.

Approximately 85 consumers died annually from 2011-2021 in the U.S. due to CO poisoning from portable generators, according to CPSC data.

What can be done? In the case of a power outage, the CPSC recommended refraining from operating a portable generator inside a home, garage, basement, crawlspace or shed.

• Portable generators should only operate outside, at least 20 feet away from the house, with the exhaust directed away from the building.
  
• Only portable generators that have an automatic safety feature that turns off in the presence of high CO levels should be used. 

To see more storm preparedness tips from the CPSC, please click here.

You may want to buy that EV now

Americans looking to purchase an electric vehicle (EV) may want to get to a dealership between Jan. 1 and March, The Associated Press reported.

During that brief window, EVs assembled in North America — using battery minerals mined and refined outside the region — could be eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit offered by the Inflation Reduction Act. 

• After March, most, “if not all,” EVs won’t qualify for the full credit, according to the AP.
  
• The Inflation Reduction Act extended the EV tax credit beyond its previous, quota-based limits that had made buyers of cars from companies like Ford, Toyota and Tesla ineligible for credits. 

But there’s a catch: The clean energy stimulus package included a controversial requirement. To qualify for the full tax credit, an EV’s battery components must have been produced and assembled in the U.S.

• This measure is intended to speed up the development of a domestic battery industry, but it is one that few, if any, U.S. manufacturers can currently meet.
  
• To take one example, General Motors expects buyers to only get $3,750 — half the total — once rules take effect. 

Brief pause: The Treasury Department announced earlier this week that it would need until March to finish rules that oversee where battery components must be sourced to get the full federal tax credit.

For now, that “should allow some consumers to get an EV a little bit cheaper than they might have otherwise,” Chris Harto, an analyst who covers transportation Consumer Reports magazine, told the AP. 

Beware markups: While more EVs may be eligible for rebates, car dealers may increase prices to cover the difference — meaning customers need to be careful they’re actually getting a deal, Harto told the AP. 

“The market for EVs has been supply limited and I don’t see that changing in the next two weeks, so that’s the real risk — that this additional tax credit gets eaten up by dealer markups,” he added.

What left researchers ‘shocked’ by college textbooks

Climate change may represent a crisis — but that isn’t how college-level biology textbooks depict it, according to a study released Wednesday.

• The amount of textbook real estate devoted to climate change has continually expanded since the 1990s, according to the paper published in PLoS.
  
• But during that same period, this material has moved ever-further into the back of the books, and become increasingly detached from practical solutions, the scientists found.

“We were shocked that textbook passages addressing climate change remained so short, even in recent decades, and that the coverage of solutions actually decreased,” the researchers from North Carolina State University said in a statement.

“The information in these textbooks educated generations; the minimal content about climate change reflects how little the topic has been valued,” they added.

Read the rest of the story here.

Nursing homes in fire zones are ill-prepared: study

Nursing homes in California located in higher-risk wildfire exposure zones tend to be less prepared for emergencies than facilities without such risk, a new study has found.

Woefully unprepared: Despite being located in fire-prone regions, these nursing homes demonstrate comparatively poor compliance with Medicare’s emergency readiness standards, according to the study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 

“Emergency preparedness in nursing homes should be commensurate with local environmental risks to ensure residents’ safety,” a statement from the journal said. 

Exposed to fire: Yale University researchers investigated homes that had received certification from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and were located within 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) of a wildfire risk area.

• Among the 1,182 facilities identified, the authors then determined that 495 sites were considered “exposed” and 687 were “unexposed.”
  
• They defined exposed as those homes with “moderate” to “very high” wildfire risk, using designations from the California Office of the State Fire Marshal. 

How unprepared were they? The authors found the exposed facilities had a greater percentage of at least one emergency preparedness deficiency — 83.9 percent versus 76.9 percent.

• The total number of emergency preparedness deficiencies also tended to be higher for exposed facilities than for unexposed sites.
  
• California nursing homes were most likely to be deficient in their use of emergency and standby power systems.

That’s particularly problematic: Power outages are directly linked with adverse outcomes among nursing home residents, according to the study.  

Many of these individuals are dependent on electric healthcare equipment and struggle to tolerate temperature fluctuations, the authors stressed. 

A chance to improve: “Our study suggests that there may be opportunities to better align nursing home emergency preparedness with local wildfire risk,” first author Natalia Festa, of Yale University School of Medicine, said in a statement. 

To find out how Festa and her colleagues recommend solving these issues please click here to read the full story.  

Wildlife Wednesday

Animals prepare for winter storm with lifesaving naps, the risks of online turtle sales and how the federal spending bill threatens whales. 

Wild animals are also preparing for the extreme cold 

• With an arctic storm poised to hit the Rockies over the next day, outdoor news site OutThere Colorado explored how wild animals adapt to protect themselves from dangerous cold. Their actions — such entering a temporary hibernation phase — have let them survive “outdoors on their own for millions of years without the intervention of humans,” a parks official told OutThere Colorado. 

Online sellers fail to disclose that small turtles can’t legally be sold as pets  

• Small turtles cannot legally be sold as pets due to the risk they pose of spreading Salmonella infection, but about half of online retailers fail to provide information about the law or the disease, according to a new study in PLoS ONE. Children are particularly vulnerable because of their propensity to put things in their mouths, the authors noted. 

Maine lawmakers seek to quietly overturn whale-protecting rules

• A provision in the government budget could sacrifice Atlantic right whales for the sake of Maine lobstermen, according to The Washington Post. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that this rider will doom the right whale to extinction,” a representative of Defenders of Wildlife said, referring to language exempting lobstermen from following new federal laws around the use of lobster traps. 

Please visit The Hill’s Sustainability section online for more and check out other newsletters here. We’ll see you tomorrow.