Big balloon strikes again (and Alameda City Council's inconsistent approach to regulating what we can buy)

Alameda Municipal Power staff members showing off on Instagram the balloon that caused Sunday's power outage.

Three thousand households across Alameda lost power for multiple hours on Sunday. The cause: a single metallic-coated balloon hitting high-voltage lines.

The golden balloon read, according to an update from Alameda Municipal Power, "Congrats Grad."

Congrats as well to the Coalition for Responsible Celebration, an industry trade group that successfully convinced three Alameda City Council members to vote against a proposed city-wide ban of metal-coated Mylar balloon sales in December.

According to AMP staff at that December meeting, each time a balloon shorts their high-voltage lines, the cost to recover and repair is typically $25,000. That cost is then covered by ratepayers (a.k.a. all of us). In addition, there's the hassles borne, on this Sunday, by the households across central Alameda from Park St. to Grand St., from Shore Line Drive up to Clement Ave.

We'll all just have to keep on incurring these costs of celebrations gone wrong until 2031 (or later), when a California law takes full effect (more on that in a minute). For now all AMP is allowed to do is publish educational blog posts, such as one from May 11 headlined "Celebrate Safely This Graduation Season: Prevent Mylar Balloon Related Outages" — and pay to fix the damage.

Alameda's electeds are prone to over- and under-regulating consumer goods

While we're on this topic, I've recently followed three different local attempts to regulate consumer goods by Alameda City Council — and let me tell you, this Council is all over the place:

3 of 5 councilmembers voted against that proposed ban of metallic coated balloons in December
5 of 5 councilmembers indicated their interest in drafting local regulations for the usage of e-bikes that already are street legal per the California Vehicle Code and meet national industry standards, but they aren't considering regulating the sale of e-motos (electric motorcycles, which are not street legal but are still sold by at least one Alameda business), at their strategy planning session in January
5 of 5 councilmembers voted to ban tobacco retailers in Alameda from selling nitrous oxide cartridges and tanks in April

California's state-wide ban on Mylar balloons... is... coming... slowly

Back to Mylar balloons in particular: Eventually, this problem will hopefully be solved. Assembly Bill 847, which was passed in 2022 and (maybe) starts on January 1, 2027, will require balloon sellers to start phasing out balloons that can conduct electricity:

By the end of its first year (perhaps January 1, 2028) at least 25% of a business’s foil balloons must pass the non-conductive electrical fault safety standard (more on the standard in a minute)
By the end of its second year, at least 55%
By the end of its third year, at least 80%
By the end of its fourth year (maybe January 1, 2031), 100% of foil balloons manufactured, sold, or offered for sale in California must be non-conductive.

Parents of younger kids, if you want to run the numbers to calculate if you'll be allowed to buy metallic coated "Congrats Grad" balloons for your own kids' high school graduations, you'll first have to review IEEE 2845 "Trial-Use Standard for Testing and Evaluating the Dielectric Performance of Celebratory Balloons in Contact with Overhead Power Distribution Lines Rated up to 38 kV System Voltage" — no, not to understand what it actually means, but rather just to see if the standard has been fully adopted by the IEEE. California's ban will only kick in after a final, rather than trial-use, version of IEEE 2845 is adopted. My Google'ing can't find any more information. If they don't finish by the end of this year, the start date of the state's ban will be delayed until that IEEE committee eventually meets, perhaps in a hotel conference room in Santa Clara or Santa Clarita or Schenectady, perhaps with danishes and coffee in the morning, a buffet at lunch, and then celebratory drinks in the evening... assuming the standards engineers are able to finish the job and vote to adopt the celebratory balloon testing standard. (I'm not a standards engineer, so I'm not speaking from experience, although my dad is and I should ask him.)

But just as this blog highlighted how Alameda's gas stations and the city itself had 10 years to upgrade their underground storage tanks and yet some put it off to the end (and one made it to the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle), no doubt some balloon-business members of the Coalition for Responsible Celebration will complain on December 31, 2030 that they are being blindsided by a "brand new ban" on Mylar balloons to take effect the next day...

In the meantime, Alameda City Council will apparently continue to under-regulate some consumer products like Mylar balloons with negative public impacts; try to over-regulate other products like e-bikes to appear responsible, while coming across as out of touch with how e-motos are actually sold to teens; and — at least in the case of Whip-Its and "Galaxy Gas" being sold to people of all ages at smoke shops — land on a reasonable regulatory answer.