US News media: Katrina? Whats a Katrina?
So local government and the levy boards failed in Katrina. Here we have the public utilities falling on there face. Must be Bush’s fault.
Official to soldier:
Here, give me your gun and take this ladder ... now go to work.
The officials simply want a scapegoat to blame
Will the military have to join the union as well?
Some officials are calling for the U.S. military to take over the managerial structure of the Long Island Power Authority until power is restored on Long Island, where more than a quarter million homes and businesses are still in the dark after Sandy and a snowstorm.
All NY Obama Voters:
Sing after me,
Katrina my Lord, Katrina . . .
Still turning away the non-union electrical crews??
The unions would raise hell.
What happened to 'shovel ready'? What happened to the trillion dollars of Porkulus? What, this project wasn't ripe for stimu-cash?
I'd love to cast Obama in the role of The Dude. "Where's the money, Lebowski?" Now there's a remake I could get into.
Military needed to fight off IBEW, that are fighting ‘scabs’ from other states?
Shoreham LI NY nuclear power plant was completed in 1984 but was never opened . Politicians voted to have it closed. “As you sow so you reap”
After Katrina (MS) I thought it would take many weeks to restore power. They had 75% done in a week. Most of the people that were without for weeks were in hard to get to places.
We had power workers from as far away as Canada. NOBODY was turned away.
The power companies are some of the most efficient operations in the country.
What these people are suffering through is a national disgrace.
but wait, I though Obama went there and waved his hand and solved all this.. Maybe if we fail to report this, people will still think that.
signed, MSM
If we engineers in the west could be so lucky.
We have to buy our own highlighters!
For those not so well informed, most of our national infrastructure has been going downhill for years. While it is operational, it can be maintained at a fairly low cost, but once it fails, it becomes very costly to restore the system to previous operating conditions.
The situation is made worse when people who don't know anything about the profession think they can fix all things by broad sweeping solutions.
The same arrogant bliss as the above reported comment occurs 98% of the time when somebody is managing an "Optimization or Optimal Control" project to install 'smart controls' throughout an infrastructure.
When operating companies don't even have adequate information to manually operate and control system failures, they won't improve things by 'automating' them.
Some things are improving with telemetry, where policies to meter everything, might make it feasible to actually have a better intuition on network flows in utility systems, but many such implementations simply install expensive meters with communications, but no well understood method to organize, track and monitor the data, let alone make intelligent decisions on load shedding.
When an electrical network is hard down, it can only be reliably brought up slowly, while coordinating loads and responses between safety devices.
Generators and local PVs, tend to complicate the problems because some installations end up back feeding the system when not properly installed per the codes.
I'm more reassured knowing they are tracking the solution manually, because it shows they actually understand how their system works from the bottom up.
The low tech solution using single line diagrams, maps, and highlighters shouldn't be ridiculed. The people who think everything in life should be a cellphone application should be ridiculed.
“It turns out there was a 300-page contract that the union controlling LIPA [the Long Island Power Authority] wanted everybody to sign first,” the utility worker, who wanted to remain anonymous, said. “We don’t have time for that. We’ve got guys ready to go. You need lawyers for this.”
“We’re not complaining about money,” the Floridian added. “You can pay us less. We don’t care. Just let us go up there.”