America’s Electrical Failures Cost Billions

For the past week, 600-700,000 Americans have been without electrical power. They are not the victims of Al Qaeda, nor of a hurricane, although weather did contribute to their situations. The lights are out (still) in many parts of St. Louis, Missouri, and in Queens, New York because the American electricity distribution system is old and decaying. Fixing it will cost huge amounts, and not fixing it will cost more. Maintenance work on the infrastructure of the country is long overdue, and the private sector is ill-equipped to do it.

The trouble in St. Louis started on Wednesday, when heavy rains came into town on the backs of wind gusts that hit 70 miles an hour. Four people died, and power to 500,000 people ceased. Another storm on Friday undid a lot of the recovery work that followed the first storm. As of 8 am this morning local time, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch says almost 237,000 still can’t turn their lights on, about 20% of the city.

A couple hours’ plane ride to the north and east, sections of Queens, New York, (home of both airports and the best baseball team in the National League) have been dark since last Monday when a storm hit. New York City has 57 power distribution networks, and 56 of them worked just fine. That is the official line from Mayor Mike “Pollyanna” Bloomberg, who said that the loss of power to 100,000 voters was an “inconvenience.” Baghdad had more juice; so one must conclude that the Mayor used the word "inconvenience" in a brand-new way.

To be fair, Con Ed, the local power company, misled him as to the gravity of the power outage. For about three days, they underestimated the number of folks sweltering in the dark (naturally, it was the hottest part of the summer thus far) by a factor of 10. Since coming clean, they have 5,200 customers without juice, having restored it to 19,800. These numbers are artificially low because a 100-apartment building counts as a single customer, just like a single family house.

Food is rotting in refrigerators, people can’t get to work, and businesses in the area are closed. The loss is going to run into the billions both in New York and St. Louis. With the electrical systems in both places decades old, it is clear that it wasn’t just the power of the storm that took the power out of both cities. Utility workers are having to go house by house, checking everything, and in Queens, manhole by manhole (one worker has been burned in a fire ball down one of those – he’s going to be OK, though, according to the hospital). Does that sound like a 21st century system? As this is being posted, 175,000 in the Los Angeles area are reportedly without electricity as the transformers failed late yesterday.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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