SIX DAYS without power! And it's not over yet! And nobody can say when it will end!
100,000 people in the dark for nearly a WEEK! It's been 100 degrees for several days this past week. Old people are trapped in their apartments with no elevator service. Sick and disabled people who rely on electrically powered medical equipment are suffering. Everyone is suffering. What caused it?
According to this ABC News report, the outage was called by Con Ed's lack of maintenance of the system. Cutting back on the maintenance budget, not even spending the money that had been budgeted:
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=investigators&id=4388181 Our check of Public Service Commission data show continued under spending on maintenance. In a three year period in which Con Ed budgeted $32 million dollars for maintenance in Queens and Brooklyn, the utility actually only spent $27 million -- 16 percent less than it had planned to spend.
Gerald Norlander: "Maintenance data suggests that Con Ed is spending less on regular preventative maintenance in the system and that needs to be investigated."
"Some of these cables might be old and the preventative maintenance should have been done years ago could have prevented this all from happening," former Con Ed worker Ariel Antonmarchi said.
According to Greg Palast, companies are no longer required to maintain the infrastructure the way they used to:
http://www.gregpalast.com/ken-lays-alive#more-1454In the old, pre-Ken days of regulation, my fellow economists used to complain about something called the Averch-Johnson Effect. The A-J Effect was the result of regulations which gave companies incentives to gold plate the electricity system, making it way TOO reliable. Too much cash was spent on keeping the lights on.
Well, gone are the days of the A-J effect. The gold-plating is gone — but not the gold. Under regulation, power sellers were limited by law to a profit of about 9%, what the law called a just and reasonable return. Now, the profits can be — and are — unreasonable, unjust and just out of sight.
On top of everything else, Con Ed low-balled the number of people affected in their first announcements, so not enough assistance was provided initially by the city and groups like Red Cross.
So are all these people sitting in the dark and the heat for six days so that Con Ed can increase it's profits? And did the Bush admin's energy policy allow that to happen? I'm not speculating, I'm asking. I really want to know and I hope someone who's studied this can tell me.
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