Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your BrainBoy, I picked the right time to take a nibble on the "News", didn't I? Never mind the gigantic clusterfuck in southern Lebanon that has given Lieberman's limpy more "Joementum" than it's had in years, with our "official" position that Israel Can Do No Wrong, I'm focussing a LOT closer to home.
Item: 100,000 in St. Louis without power since earlier this week from storm damage, now more in the dark (and the heat) from yesterday's storms. Repairs are progressing so slowly it seems as though there are no repairs going on.
Item: Large portions of Queens in NYC are without power, Con-Ed doesn't know why, and many people are still in the dark after FIVE DAYS....
What's going on here? Have our metropolises gotten so big that a wide-spread failure of infrastructure paralyses the Powers That THINK They Are? Have the Utility companies moved their field crews Cheez around so much that they have insuficient ability to quickly act, drafting instead "Mutual Aid MOUs" with neighbouring companies who may also be up to their own assholes in alligators?
What happens when a major power outage affects water pumping stations and sewage lift stations? No water to drink, and because the 759th Law of Physics states "Shit flows Downhill", your toilets back up and start to flood you out of the house...
Katrina, the "evacuation" of Beirut, Our goat-rodeo in Iraq and Afghanistan, "Heck of a job, Brownie"....
Maybe our Burgomeisters should quit concentrating on sucking on the DHS "The WAHR Agin Terra"(tm) tit (almost 9,000 targets here in Indy-Anna!) and get back to doing what they USED to do best, running their cities.
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Also, I think, at least here in upstate NY with National Grid, that they aren't employing as many linesmen as they used to.
Jessh. I don't know. You raise an interesting topic and I suspect you could look at everything from declining participation rates in volunteer fire departments to public opinion regarding utility and emergency responder personnel.
I wonder too if it's harder to run a small municipality or township than it used to be. It's probably quite a more complex, and maybe many mayors and city managers aren't equipped to deal with it (note: this is not me calling small town mayors idiots -- just think of the complex regulatory apparatus alone).
And then there's the clusterfuck that Bush's cronies have turned FEMA into.
