Mike.

Lauren.

Mike, it's been a week of some pretty heart-wrenching news on top of the news related to the pandemic.

Yep.

The world is either on fire or underwater or at war, it seems.

Yes, because it seems that way because it is true.

So this week, we're going to be talking about power on the Gadgett Lab podcast, not the kind of power that involves influence or control, but power as utility. And how power might be restored to the people of New Orleans. All right, let's do it.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired.

And I am Michael Colori, a senior editor at Wired. We're also joined by Wired Senior Writer, Lily Newman, who is patching in from New York.

She's done the thing where she's hanging out in a very, very small space that we can see on Zoom because it's better for sound. Lily, we appreciate you cramming yourself into what

appears to be a coat closet. Thank you for having me. Welcome back to my closet. So we brought

Lily on because today we're talking about the power outage in New Orleans.

Earlier this week, Hurricane Ida swept through parts of the southern U.S.

leaving widespread destruction in its path.

It also knocked out power across Louisiana, leaving over a million customers in the dark.

And the city of New Orleans was especially hard hit.

Now officials are saying it could

take weeks for the power to be turned back on. So today we're talking all about power. In the second

half of the show, we're going to talk about another dire potential problem. We'll talk about threats

to our communications infrastructure from solar storms. But first, there's a more immediate

crisis unfolding in Louisiana and parts of Mississippi. Lily, before we talk about bringing power

back to New Orleans, tell us first what happened. So in the situation with Hurricane Ida,

...