This week, 144,000 residents in Northern California were knocked off the grid in the latest round of planned public safety power shut-offs by utility PG&E. Last month, the company cut power to more than 2 million customers in a move to prevent wildfires. The sweeping outages had unanticipated consequences, particularly for people’s health.

On this episode of our podcast, we sit down with Direct Relief journalist, Paul Sherer, who reported on the effects last month’s outages had on health centers. He spoke with multiple health centers in rural California that struggled to keep the lights on —and the water running.