Between the Lines
  

When Irene Rendered us Powerless.  by Fred Martel When my sister called from San Antonio a few weeks ago to tell me that mom was coming back to visit me, she meant hurricane Irene. Our mom Irene passed away in 2001. She was quite proficient at brewing her own type of storm. Just kidding, mom.   I noted as I walked down the driveway on that Sunday morning to get the newspapers that Irene was barely making her mark. Not much wind at all and no rain yet. An hour later – at 8:30 – the power went out. Twenty or so minutes later the rain came so I placed buckets outside to collect rain water. When you live in the country and you do not plan ahead and install conveniences like a power generator, you pay for your procrastination (I at least had the vision to get six buckets and plenty of bottled water). And so for five days the buckets served to flush two toilets; bottled water became portable showers; three coolers served as refrigerators and the gas cooktop and barbeque grill the answer to meal preparation. Thankfully the ice company in a nearby city did not lose power. Flash lights and candles took us back to the old days with evenings occupied with reading, card games and board games. Story continues below ↓ advertisement | your ad here

National Grid, their recorded messages told us, was all over it. You could sign up for text messages sent to your cell phone. The texts were sent frequently to keep you up to date - that you still didn’t have power but they were working on it. Thanks. That was helpful. From Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania to Vermont and Maine they were hard at work cutting fallen trees and repairing damaged power lines. On Wednesday the National Grid text message told me that our town was next on the list. We should have power restored by Monday. Ouch! Thursday I located a generator that I could borrow, so at 3:30 I picked it up. At 3:35 I got the call that the power was restored. How convenient! It seems as though what we learned from this event is that the power grids in many states – if not the entire country – are in need of help. In fact we learn this every time there is a power outage. One town, a suburb of Providence, has a series of grids that are in need of an upgrade. One block, with houses back to back with streets running east to west, experienced an outage on the north side of the block but not on the south side. My friend on the south side ran an extension cord to each of two neighbors in his back yard to ease their pain. At least they have city water. Power was restored in three days. Interviews with people who live in that town yielded varying answers to the question “did you lose power?” They ranged from not at all to one hour, one day or three days. The area super markets were operating on backup generators that couldn’t handle freezers, so they were forced to throw out lots of food. There are no answers forthcoming from the utility company on how anyone plans to correct these problems associated with dysfunctional power grids. That is not to diminish the intensity of Irene and the extensive damage she caused nor does it take away from the fact that hundreds if not thousands people worked around the clock to get us all back up and running. What we know is that customers who pay as much as they do for electricity deserve a functional, up-to-date system. It seems like yesterday when an act of Congress might help, but the only acting they’ve done in years is on camera doing interviews and serving their masters – the lobbyists. They now enjoy a twelve percent approval rating. That doesn’t seem to bother them. But I worry about those twelve percent of the population. What are they thinking?                                                            ###