Eastern Massachusetts didn’t get quite as much snow as the NYC area during what is now officially “the Blizzard of 2010”, but in one town on the South Shore some families had to be evacuated when a seawall collapsed and two flooded houses caught fire. Physics being a harsh taskmaster, divers scrambled to connect hoses even as their fellow firefighters stood thigh-deep in icy water (there’s video at the links, but I can’t embed it here.) Now the Scituate Fire Department is talking darkly about “investigating” the local electric company for deliberately understaffing and consequently diverting essential personnel:
The flooding and the fires that investigators said it caused were a battle, but National Grid crews were still scrambling to turn on electricity to about 1,000 customers.
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At the height of the storm, firefighters said they had to watch down lines because National Grid did not respond.
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“We were forced to baby-sit these wires, and we ran out of manpower,” a Scituate Fire Department Chief Richard Judge said.
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“The suspicion among the public professionals, who probably won’t say it, was that there was a reliance on our public safety professionals to have to baby-sit these wires as a way of saving money for National Grid,” Rep. Jim Cantwell said.
National Grid’s immediate response is that nobody could have predicted a windstorm forecast at least five days in advance (the phrase “winds equivalent to a Category Two hurricane” was in heavy rotation) would bring down so many powerlines (even though powerlines regularly come down during every high wind and/or moderate snow event). And on a Sunday evening, during a vacation week — so inconsiderate!
Equally predictably, some of the people who voted for Scotty Brown are complaining that firefighters are just “whiners” who resent having to do anything to justify their cushy jobs and fat pensions.
Fortunately, nobody died this time, but I predict that in 2011 we’ll see a lot more cases where private utilities cut corners under the no-longer-true assumption that public services can pick up the slack…
Tom65
Already happening here in the DC area. A standard-issue thunderstorm took down Montgomery County MD for three days this past summer. The main culprit was untrimmed vegetation (trees) taking out major lines. PEPCO hasn’t been maintaining those lines for years now.
MikeJ
Don’t ya love it when private companies name themselves things like “National Grid”? No, no, of course they’re not trying to make anybody think they’re a government entity, why ever would you say that? Is it their fault if people incorrectly assume that they have government permission for everything from pushing around property owners to leaning on delinquent bill payers.
Redshirt
Ah, Scotty Brown. I was just sitting behind this old, beat up, rusted out pickup with a variety of USMC stickers, and Scotty Brown for Senate stickers, asking myself: What in the world does this guy get from Scott Brown, and the Republicans? Anything?
Is it that one single issue the Repugs use to divide and conquer? Guns?
It’s a good, evil strategy – make it all about that single issue (whatever it is), then rob everyone blind while they focus on that.
c u n d gulag
RepubliKlan view:
If there was global warming, you couldn’t have fire AND ice at the same time.
Villago Delenda Est
Really, what do you expect from entities that exist for the pursuit of one thing, and one thing only: sacred short term profit? They will cut corners with that goal alone in mind predictably and with absolute certainty. Safety? Continuity of service? Bah, those things get in the way of sacred profit!
Cheryl from Maryland
@Tom65: Not to mention the house in DC that caught on fire because Pepco took about 4 hours to respond to downed line calls. Calls from both the homeowner AND the fire department. Someone explain to me again why it is better to have public utilities and hospitals privatized?
MikeJ
@Cheryl from Maryland: Competition! You’ve surely noticed that there are dozens of different companies from whom you could buy your power, and who will each be responsible for their own power lines.
Omnes Omnibus
@MikeJ: As it turns out, I have failed to notice this. I wonder why. Perhaps I am not very observant.
PurpleGirl
@Cheryl from Maryland: Most public utilities (electric companies) were private but they were much more heavily regulated. Deregulation in the late 90s changed the picture quite a bit as to what emergency personnel was kept at the ready.
(Changed a lot of things, not for the better though.)
Odie Hugh Manatee
What many people forget is that government services are more responsive to your need than for-profit businesses are. People like to stereotype otherwise but with most agencies you do have someone you can go to that is above the person you are having problems with. While it’s true that this won’t happen every time it needs to, it’s more likely that you will find a resolution to your problem faster and probably for less $$$ than you would with a business.
Essential services, like health services, road services and building standards, should be offered and handled by the governments (local, county, state and federal). There are certain things that you need as a base for a good and healthy life and economic environment, they should not be subjected to the whims of the capitalist markets as if they are something to be sold away to the highest bidder.
gbear
When the Twin Cities papers were running stories about how snow cleanup was going slowly after our 20″ snowfall a few weeks ago, the comments sections filled with rants about our lazy, overpaid, underworked, worthless firemen and public works staff. Anyone who tried to point out that there were reasons for the city not having enough staff for the situation was shouted down as a socialist who wanted all of our money to go to the mayors and Obama. So many stupid people.
jeffreyw
Damn government can’t do shit right. They’ll be wanting gubmint workers doin every little thing. Hah! I tells ya one damn thing remains private, and that’s the communion between a man and his breakfast. Take that away and all the fiat money inna world can’t buy ya any respect at the table.
And another damn thing while I’m at it: Why the fuck should I? Goddammit! The bastards. And fuck you, too, Hughes.net. Harumph
Florida Cynic
Florida power companies tried not trimming trees for a few years as a cost saving measure. Turns out that a few hurricanes wipes out any savings created by not doing maintenance. The tree trimming has returned.
As a side note, most utility companies are losing linemen to retirement faster than they are replacing them, and it isn’t an intentional effort to cut costs. The spots are hard to fill, even with above average pay.
MikeJ
@Florida Cynic:
I know I need a small vacation
But it don’t look like rain
And if it snows that stretch
Down South won’t ever stand the strain
gypsy howell
It’s not just my imagination, right? Things really ARE getting worse and worse. American society really is crumbling before our very eyes.
I wonder how bad things will get before people start demanding something better. Or maybe we won’t, and we’ll just destroy ourselves over the last bits and crumbs. I guess things don’t have to get better in the long run, do they?
Original Lee
What I find puzzling is that many utilities have been promising to bury their lines instead of replacing the wooden utility poles, but then they don’t do it. I would think the cost savings from not having to trim vegetation and not putting linemen on overtime after a storm would far outweigh the cost of burying the lines.
Alwhite
@MikeJ:
That was the lie sold to California – it led to unprecedented power outages/brown outs and those lovely recordings of power company assholes laughing about freezing granny while they fucked with the grid so as to create those shortages.
Alwhite
@gypsy howell:
People are already demanding more & better from the government. They just expect that THEY don’t have to pay for any of it.
KCinDC
Meanwhile I’m shocked to discover who the New York Post has identified as responsible for the snow problems in NYC: lazy, overpaid public employees. Some of them even “admitted” that they got paid overtime for working 14-hour shifts.
Omnes Omnibus
@Original Lee: The savings won’t show up in next quarter’s balance sheet, but some of the expense will.
nancydarling
I remember talking to a Southern California Edison employee back in the 90’s just before CA deregulated. He predicted all of this. According to him, the utilities would cut back on the number of employees to remain competitive. This would be fine, until an emergency arose—then there would not be enough people to get everyone back on line quickly. This happened to a friend living in Redondo Beach. I don’t remember her problem but Edison had to send for a technician in San Bernadino to repair it. There was not a qualified tech in the whole LA basin available at the time!
Also, deregulation was never meant to help the small customer, since only the electricity generation part of your bill became negotiable. For a hundred dollar monthly bill, maybe twenty of it is for generation. Hardly worth your time to shop around for a ten per cent saving. Big corporate users can afford to hire someone whose only purpose is to shop for such savings which can amount to thousands of dollars per month.
Redshirt
@gypsy howell: It’s Imperial Rot. We once – not very long ago – were a nation that invested in our nation: Highways, bridges, etc. Since St. Ronnie’s Revolution, we’ve become the national equivalent of someone maxed out on credit cards so they can have a 50 inch flatscreen in every room.
You can see this fundamental shift when looking at nation’s on the rise – China is doing nothing but investing in their own nation. We were once like that, and it was not that long ago.
Will we ever get back? Signs point to no.
Joey Maloney
@MikeJ:
During the infancy of commercial electrification, that was absolutely the case. To make things even more fun, the industry hadn’t yet standardized voltage/current levels, or even whether to use DC or AC. In the book Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World there are pictures, street scenes from Manhattan where literally dozens of parallel sets of wires block out the sky.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Original Lee:
Most of our lines are buried in our small coastal town (south Oregon@Ore/Cal border), same for other many other Oregon coastal communities. Whenever we have power outages, if they are local then they are usually transformer related but more often than not our outages are caused by downed lines further inland.
Paris
Our land line develops static once a year so bad it becomes unusable. The ‘phone’ company comes and reports that the lines a couple miles up the road are more patches than line, then they apply another patch. Yeah, competition! One phone company responsible for everything was soooooooo complicated. Our land line connects to a rotary phone that > 30 years old and works just fine.
p.a.
Speaking as an employee of a formerly publicly regulated utility (not Nat’l Grid) which now is in a very competitive environment, you can’t have it both ways, folks. You can’t, in a competitive environment, maintain manpower levels to meet emergency manpower demands which may only occur every other year, and remain in business. And also,one of the first costs cut is PM- preventive maintenance- since what is prevented from happening is not quantifiable.
So you have competition, and lower rates (maybe), inadequate manpower for emergency demands. (and in a question more suitable for Yglesias’ blog, since under the old telcos business service subsidized residential, I wonder how much the average consumer has benefited from deregulation. How much would old, slow Ma Bell have slowed technological progress if she had been allowed to survive compared to the brave new world of the intertubes and 4G?)
kenny
@MikeJ:
To be fair, the National Grid name descends from when the company in question was a UK government owned organisation whose job was to operate the electricity transmission network in the UK(literally the ‘National Grid’),rather than an attempt to make people think it’s a public body.
ericblair
@nancydarling:
Bingo. Private sector competition works just great when it’s non-emergency goods and services with repeat customers. When it’s non-emergency, people can actually shop around and don’t have to get gouged. When there are repeat customers, businesses usually have to give a shit what their customers think otherwise their business will dry up.
Private sector competition sucks for high-impact once-in-a-blue-moon events, for the simple reason that’s it’s much more profitable in the short run to not prepare for it, pocket the money you should be using to prepare, and cross your fingers that the shit doesn’t hit the fan on your watch. Hey, even if it does, who coulda node, gotta get bailed out by the evil gubmit. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses, retire to a nice judgment-proof mansion in Florida.
Tokyokie
Our local electrical-line company, the legacy electric utility, some years ago decided that it was cheaper to hire emergency crews from outside the area after major thunderstorms than to keep maintenance crews on the payroll trimming trees. And as a result, three springs ago, about 75,000 people (including ourselves) were without electricity for a week. But hey, the storms cooled off the weather, so not that many people died from heat-related causes due to not having air conditioning. It’s a win-win! The CEO cashed out his stock and became a billionaire, and Jim Baker made a big wad of dough leading the effort to take the company private. Somehow I’m guessing those guys didn’t have their power interrupted.
Luc
The construction of the US power lines reminds me more of a developing country than a industrialized nation. Clearly there are no economic incentives nor regulations in place to provide reliable electricity.
I do not know why there are such great differences in comparison to Europe. Growing up in Germany, I remember a single power outage (must have been in the seventies). Living in Maryland for 8 years, power outages seem to be the rule after every single generic storm. A few years ago an important powerline in Germantown, close to DC, was brought down without any storm; supposedly by too-many-birds sitting on it. The repair needed several days.
PQuincy
@Original Lee:
It gets worse than that. We used to live in San Diego, renting a cheap house in a rather tony neighborhood in La Jolla…which was disfigured by a snakes-nest of over head wires. People were buying the neighboring cottages to tear down and build million-dollar condos, out of whose windows they could contemplate a snarl of electric, phone, and cable connections.
Meanwhile, the local (private) power company had been collecting a surcharge for years, authorized by its regulators, to pay for relocating wires underground. They happily collected the money, but somehow found reasons to never actually spend any of it on, say, relocating wires underground.
Ah, late capitalism and regulatory capture!
PQuincy
@Luc:
Where I live now, electricity is provided by a city-run public utility (which also does trash, sewer, water and recycling). Reliable as Old Faithful, very reasonably priced, and when you have a problem, the people on the phone are friendly, helpful and efficient.
God I hate socialism ;-)
debbie
This line of reasoning is nauseatingly reminiscent of Condi Rice’s defense as to why no one in the Bush administration could have predicted the 9/11 attacks, despite having read the PDB that warned of an imminent highjacking. “If you’d have told me that 19 men with box cutters…slammed airplanes into the World Trade Center…” As if she needed the exact scenario presented to her before it could be successfully thwarted. Anything else and, hey, how could they have seen it coming? I suppose if there’d been a PDB that said there would be fewer men or they wielded steak knives, she’d still have an out.
I say National Grid adopt this policy: Anytime any form of bad weather is forecast, get ready for the worst.
Lee
I’ve lived in my current house for 10 years. Our powerlines are buried coming into the subdivision and we are the first subdivision south of the power plant 5 miles away.
We have had 2 power outages in 10 years. We had a windstorm that knocked fences in our neighborhood and tore roofs off houses a couple of miles away and the power still remained on.
IIRC back in the late 80’s after one of the fires in southern california one town dictated that ALL lines had to be buried as downed lines causes fire fighters to have to stop as they could not drive across downed lines. There was much nashing of teeth and pulling of hair by the power companies. I’ve always wondered what happened to the lines.
I certainly don’t understand why more people don’t fight above ground lines as a public safety issue.
Mnemosyne
@Alwhite:
Somehow, I’ve managed to live only in So Cal cities that refused to privatize and I’m so grateful for it. Our power went out three or four times last night for about 15 minutes each time before DWP got it up and running again. Something was going on (probably a downed line), because I could see fire, police and DWP trucks all gathered on the next block.
I wandered outside with my flashlight about 10 minutes after the first outage happened and saw the DWP truck driving by at a pretty fast clip towards whatever was going on. That’s service!
Barry
@Florida Cynic: “As a side note, most utility companies are losing linemen to retirement faster than they are replacing them, and it isn’t an intentional effort to cut costs. The spots are hard to fill, even with above average pay. ”
I don’t believe this. The pay, benefits and job security would faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar outweigh such work as landscaping work, and they seem to keep their ranks full.
Gene in Princeton
@Alwhite: Those were Enron traders doing the laughing, IIRC.
Judas Escargot
@p.a.: And also,one of the first costs cut is PM- preventive maintenance- since what is prevented from happening is not quantifiable.
There are entire branches of mathematics and engineering dedicated to quantifying exactly that.
Your company doesn’t employ any engineers or actuaries?
Judas Escargot
@Redshirt:
I don’t think it’s so much about the guns. Here in MA the GOP is getting pretty deft at exploiting social tensions that have always been there: town versus gown, or liberal white-collar Boston techno-weenies versus blue collar tradesmen out in the ‘halo’.
These folks used to be solid Blue pre-Reagan: Union workers, kept well-employed by the old Democratic machine. But Tip O’Neill and the Kennedys are all dead and buried, the unions gone or wasting away, and the trend towards privatizing every damned thing has changed that model. Add to that a low-grade racism (more about economic resentment than anything else) fueled by the influx of Hispanic workers, and you get many pockets of Red in all the more affluent burbs.
Watch This Old House: Those are the folks voting for Scott Brown or Charlie Baker.
Barry
@Judas Escargot: “There are entire branches of mathematics and engineering dedicated to quantifying exactly that.
Your company doesn’t employ any engineers or actuaries?”
Or reliability engineers.
However, the subjunctive ‘would’ costs lose to the real, existing money which can be
put into the executives’ pocketssaved.Zuzu's Petals
My sister is renting a house right on the beach in Humarock/Scituate. Pics of the ocean coming over the seawall were quite dramatic. They were evacuated by the fire dept at 2:30 am after the sea flooded around them and the river rose behind them. They made it out just before the roads closed.
The worst part? Paying almost full price for two nights at the Rockland Holiday Inn, for rooms with no heat, no light, and no hot water…sleeping with their coats on to stay warm. After many phone calls on her part, they agreed to take off about 20%…sort of like an AARP discount. Jerks.
PanAmerican
@Barry:
The labor market isn’t faith based. The jobs skills required for linemen raise the barriers to entry along with the remuneration.
tkogrumpy
I love the internets. I grew up on the south shore and would not have known this without your post.