Troubled Waters: The Salton Sea Project Part 2 - Toxic Exposure kesq.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kesq.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Print article First they struck California, then Texas. Now blackouts are threatening the entire U.S. West as nearly a dozen states head into summer with too little electricity. From New Mexico to Washington, power grids are being strained by forces years in the making - some of them fueled by climate change, others by the fight against it. If a heat wave strikes the whole region at once, the rolling outages that darkened Southern California and Silicon Valley last August will have been previews, not flukes. “It’s really the same case in different parts of the West,” said Elliot Mainzer, chief executive officer of the California Independent System Operator, which runs most of the state’s grid. “It’s revealed competition for scarce resources that we haven’t seen for some time.”
Members of the Imperial Irrigation District board of directors are pitted against one another in a months-long battle that has spilled from public meetings to controversial closed-door sessions and now into a courtroom. At stake is an agreement with organized labor that will determine who gets tens of millions of dollars of IID business.
Only days before a new board was seated in December 2020 and after major campaign contributions by unions failed to gain support for their preferred candidates IID s outgoing board quickly pushed through a project labor agreement, or PLA. This group of contracts, approved on a 3-2 vote, would for the next decade set the terms of the labor IID must use for projects expected to cost $750,000 or more.
From New Mexico to Washington, power grids are being strained by forces years in the making — some of them fueled by climate change, others by the fight against it.