The Grid Blog

NOAA just rebuilt the hurricane forecast cone to include inland watches and warnings for the first time since the graphic debuted in 2002. The reason isn't subtle: the deadliest hurricane since Katrina did almost all its killing 300+ miles from the beach. The cone used to end where the coast did Sin…

As of Friday morning, August 14, 2026, the National Weather Service has a Hurricane Warning in effect for the Big Island of Hawaii — Kona, Kohala, and the island's east, north, south, southeast, interior, and summit zones. Tropical Storm Lala was about 455 miles east-southeast of Hilo with 60 mph su…

On Sunday morning, Hawaiian Electric published a sentence that most utilities try very hard never to write: customers should "prepare for extended outages lasting weeks or even months in the hardest hit rural areas of Hawaii Island." Tropical Storm Lala is gone. The National Weather Service in Honol…

This morning the National Hurricane Center published a two-sentence forecast for the entire Atlantic basin: "Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days." That's the whole outlook. No invests, no cone graphics, no shaded blobs off Africa. If you only pay attention to hurricanes…

Move-in week is a logistics problem. Mini fridge, roommate, parking pass. Nobody in the loading zone is thinking about hazard profiles. They probably should be, because a household that splits across state lines quietly stops sharing an emergency plan. Not the paperwork — the assumptions. The kid wh…

"Fire season" is a useful phrase if you're staffing hotshot crews or staging air tankers. It's a bad phrase for planning your own household, because the federal record doesn't really support it. I pulled every wildfire disaster declaration in FEMA's OpenFEMA database — incident type "Fire," 1953 thr…

On April 5, 2024, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake hit Tewksbury, New Jersey. It broke no records for size. It did break one for reach: 184,672 people filed a "Did You Feel It?" report with the USGS — the most felt reports the agency has ever logged for a single earthquake, anywhere. I pulled the ZIP-code…

At 2:00 a.m. Hawaii time this morning, Hurricane Lala was a Category 3 with 125 mph sustained winds. Overnight it touched 130 mph — Category 4. That is the strongest Lala has ever been, and it is very close to the least dangerous Lala has ever been. The hurricane warnings in effect right now cover t…

The National Weather Service office in Phoenix issued an Extreme Heat Watch just before midnight Wednesday. It covers the entire Phoenix metro area — Central Phoenix, Deer Valley, Scottsdale/Paradise Valley, the East and Southeast Valley, Buckeye/Avondale, Glendale, Ahwatukee, Queen Creek — from Mon…

If your power flickered out for a few hours sometime in the last year, you weren't imagining a trend. The U.S. Energy Information Administration's most recent Electric Power Annual puts a number on it: the average American electricity customer went without power for about 11 hours in 2024 — nearly d…