“Power gridlock gave LI a jolt”, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, September 4, 2011
Living off the grid isn’t so juicy, after all.
A few hours or even a day without electricity?
That falls into the tolerable zone. The kids like playing with candles. The iPhone can still be powered in the car. But somewhere around hour 26, when the food’s getting stinky in a comatose fridge and the air conditioner’s on extended strike, the whole disconnected lifestyle gets awfully tiresome. A no-big-deal adventure becomes a total, maddening pain.
And people start doing crazy things. You can’t defend Walter Murphy’s alleged method. But his frustration is easy enough to comprehend. Police say the Hicksville man grew so angry by juice-less day number 3, he phoned Nassau emergency management with violent threats for LIPA.
Hey, Walter! Did you ever think they might record those calls?
But even anger-management graduates were asking questions and looking for somebody to blame.
What happens when we get a real hurricane?
Irene, a category 0, gave 523,000 Long Island families and businesses a taste of the Unabomber lifestyle. Barely 165,000 of those customers were back on line by Wednesday. On Friday afternoon, 66,000 still couldn’t turn the coffee maker on.
Utility execs insisted all week they were doing what they could. No doubt they were trying. But their “slow but steady” power return sure seemed tilted toward the “slow.”
Everyone agrees we have to do better next time.
ELECTRIC SLIDE
1. Transistor baseball broadcasts
2. Car-battery cell-phone charges
3. Flashlight novels
4. Seeing-eye children
5. Candlelight breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snack
THE NEWS IN SONG:
“This City” by Steve Earle
http://tinyurl.com/wontdrown
ASKED AND UNANSWERED:
Brookhaven, Caleb Smith and Wildwood state parks were still officially closed as the picnic-centric Labor Day weekend arrived? Come on, how much electricity does a state park need?…Is the Mets deal Ein-off for good?…Why did Lindsay Lohan go to Hollywood’s Shamrock Social Club for her Billy Joel tattoo? LI’s ink shops aren’t good enough? Is that what LiLo (and BJ) mean by “I Go to Extremes”?…What about surrogate-birth paternity leave? Why be sexist?…Totally stoked that the Quicksilver Pro Surf Competition is coming to Long Beach Sept.5-15. But how ’bout a moment of silence – or better yet, one great ride – in memory of Long Beach High surfing coach and local wave-riding legend Daniel Bobis, KIA this summer off Indonesia?…Are Bellport-based Bloods still looking for a piece of the Poospatuck smoke-shop business in Mastic? These off-Rez gangsters aren’t known for saying “thank you” and “please.”…Any fresh leads on the Northport train-station men’s-room attack? It’s been three weeks now…Are Nassau cops shooting more frequently? Or were Brandon Pasker and Kurt Doerbecker just tragic aberrations?…Who exactly gets to vote on Ed Mangano‘s plan to hand over Long Island bus to Veolia Transportation? Just the seven members of the Nassau’s legislature’s rules committee? Not the riders? Not the citizens? Not even the whole legislature?…
LONG ISLANDERS OF THE WEEK
THE RE-JUICERS
The questions will still be flowing months from now: Did so many homes have to lose power? Is our grid as safe as it can be? Did the power have to stay off that long? But no one can doubt the hard work of the men and women, who reconnected Long Island post-Irene. LIPA owns the system, but National Grid, the British transmission conglomerate that bought Keyspan three years ago, maintains the island’s power infrastructure. So it’s local workers and an insta-army of out-of-state contractors who’ve been climbing the poles, riding the buckets and swearing day and night to get the power back on. Thank you for it. Keep at it, please, until the last 60-inch plasma is humming again