Welcome to the increasingly unstable power situation in the US. We’re getting like the Third World, aren’t we?
No it’s not Yemen, where power outages in the capital Sana’a have sparked a new round of protests. It’s the United States of America, where corruption converges with a moribund electricity distribution system to produce increasingly frequent blackouts across the Midwest and East Coast.
Blackouts in these areas are becoming the norm. Too many power companies fired support staff assuming they would get temp help when needed. After all, “shareholder value” must be boosted so screw the reliability of the electrical grid.
I grew up in Connecticut and have family and friends there. An admittedly freak snow storm last October took down trees across the state. Power was out for over a week for many homes. Had the power company been trimming tree branches as they should have been, much of this would have been avoided. Worse, they had to hire contractors from other states to clean up the mess because they’d laid off much of their own staff to cut costs and boost that all-important stock price. Also, the Connecticut grid and interconnects are old and feeble. This contributes to unstable power and the grid should have been upgraded years ago. Stable electricity is too important to be left in the hands of companies solely interested in making a profit.
Everyone would like to know why [more blackouts are happening]. The answer is simple, and three-fold: An outdated electricity distribution system, corruption and mismanagement.