If you have ever had to deal with Dominion power, or one of the other monopolistic power corporations out east in the US, you probably know.
We had a tiny snowstorm here, not more than an inch or so of accumulation. It didn't even get below freezing.
So of course, everyone here drives like a fucking maniac, businesses close, and people cry blizzard. Also something strange happened, all over the state, power lines were broken, for one reason or another... including a one block area starting at my side of the street.
This says two things, not only are these sections of the power grid fragile (no backup lines, badly maintained lines, no tree trimming) it also says Dominion is an incompetent company.
These power outages are wholey preventable, there is NO REASON FOR THIS CRAP. I've lived all over the country, you know what they do? Follow each line once a year, maybe twice, remove the branches laying on the lines, clean up around them, trim the trees, and do a little preventative care.
Here though, they wait for something to break, then spend a day to a week to fix it. After the hurricane back in 2011 (i think) we were without power for 9 days because they couldn't find a single tiny fault in their network... Where we kept telling them the fault was (a giant fucking tree fell in to the street and took out the fragile little curl in their power network) We had to fucking walk them up the street before they realized that "oh, right, your power actually DOES come in from this direction."
This time we called them, told them exactly where it was, they were happy to say "yah sure, whatever you say bub, will be fixed by saturday."
So, in the middle of winter, (hey it is snowing, and did get below freezing last night) we are expected to be without power for 4 days, mind you we have electric heat. And this goes for the 50 or so other houses around this large block. Just because they felt it was a better (Read cheaper) idea to wait until something broke.
I don't buy it, they aren't being paid by those 50 some houses, our house is rather power hungry with dozens of servers and lights on 24/7, others may be similar in the neighborhood. So its likely our house alone would happily pay the 2 hours of pay the guy would need to come down and trim the trees once a spring and check the line for degredation. How much money do they lose, because they don't want to pay their employees to do a good job?
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11 years, 1 month ago
07 Mar 2013 14:38 CET
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