Mitigating blackout along the cascading pathways

Many countries experienced severe power outages caused by ice/wet-snow storms in recent years. Affected by climate change, scientists believe that similar disaster will be more frequent, more severe and longer lasting. Most of our present prevention and treatment methods are not fully developed for wide practical application. Building a power network that can tolerate any snow storm, will be too costly to be feasible. In this paper, based on investigation of Vancouver's snow-caused power outage in Nov 2006, a dependency network has been built to represent these principal cascading pathways unfolded during this power outage, with which the effects of changed climate, the causalities among these root conditions and consequences etc. are illustrated, the developing mechanism of such kind of disaster is pinpointed accordingly. Through analysis on this network, we propose a systematic strategy to actively suppress the development of snow storm, as well as to block its propagation along these cascading pathways. Related countermeasures, such as to build an early warning system, to inhibit the development of a wet-snow disaster by artificial precipitation stimulation, to strengthen these vulnerable locations with underground cable etc., are described.