Failure after Failure

A year ago Bob wrote about the faulty design and construction of the electric power distribution system in the US, a system that is DESIGNED TO FAIL. Last year in Seattle 50 people died while living without electricity. Some froze to death and some died of carbon monoxide trying to cook or stay warm from fuel fired heat sources. Our whole society is dependent on our electric appliances. Our heating systems won’t work without electricity, not even our oil or gas fueled furnaces. We have come to think of our electricity as always there, but the whole system is poorly designed and very shoddy construction. It is designed to fail, and to kill people when it fails.

After two million people in Seattle suffered through a winter blizzard without electricity last year, and watched in horror as 50 people died, one might think that there would be a public demand for improvements in the electric distribution system. One might think that the public might demand that the very shaky and unstable electric system be made more robust, be designed to survive a modest storm. But nothing has been done.

According to this week’s news, the Seattle area experienced its first storm of this year and 280,000 people are without electric service. The totally crap power grid failed again when the first autumn wind blew. It holds up in the summer, in nice weather, when our comfort and our very lives are not at risk. But its designed to fail and fall down with the first autumn wind that blows. Read story The bungling idiots at Seattle City Light, Puget Sound Power, and other greedy money grabbing incompetents ought to be summarily fired for malfeasance of their responsibility as design engineers, and the management of those firms should be held criminally liable for dereliction of their responsibility to the public.

Seattle, of course, is not unique. The electric grid all across America is built much the same. In the Southeastern US this week there are also several areas where the electric grid has failed.

We are not talking about extreme conditions such as the center of a tornado. Such extreme conditions affect only a small area, though that area is subjected to extreme violence. Some buildings such as schools in tornado alley must be designed to withstand even the most extreme storms and to protect children housed inside. Failure to design adequate storm resistant schools is criminal malicious malfeasance of design responsibility. The electric grid could be excused for failure during a limited area extreme storm such as a tornado where the surrounding area is not affected. It can be quickly restored to buildings in the small affected area. That does not excuse an electric grid that fails during normal expected weather conditions such as annual wind, rain, and snow storms. Allowing such a necessary part of modern life to be hung on a shoestring and vulnerable in the face of normal expected weather is unconscionable.

We need to wake up people. We can not accept such horrible shoddy design and construction of such an important part of our lives. The reason it’s built so cheaply is because the utility owners are getting rich on the money that should be spent to construct a decent reliable system. There is no excuse for it, and we ought not accept it. Our necessary utilities are designed to fail That is not acceptable.