Recurrent power outages and the mental health burden of grid reliability in Maryland
Meng Feng, Yueming (Lucy) Qiu, Jie Chen, Jiehong Lou, Yi David Wang · 2026
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Description
Meng Feng and co-authors link, in a 2026 study, frequent power outages in Maryland to higher hospital rates for mental health crises. Outages are rising with aging grids, climate stress, and growing demand, yet their mental toll outside big disasters was unmeasured. The team joined outage records at fifteen-minute grain to hospital data from 2018 to 2023.
Areas and quarters with more outages saw more mental health hospital stays, after weather, income, and care access were weighed. The rise was about two percent per unit step in outage counts. Short failures of one to three hours, when frequent, drove much of the link. Grid reliability, the authors argue, is a health issue, not just an engineering one.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Meng Feng, Yueming (Lucy) Qiu, Jie Chen, Jiehong Lou, Yi David Wang |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 94 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |