I love reading smug editorials about the problems in other countries. India certainly has its problems. It sounds like they have a corrupt dysfuctional government that allocates their resources foolishly. I’m sure glad I don’t live in a country like that. Their electrical power grid is ancient and overloaded. I’m sure glad my country has a modern efficient electrical grid. Surely a one hour thunderstorm couldn’t knock out power to hundreds of thousands for weeks. Surely an ice storm couldn’t knock out power to thousands for a month. It seems the people of India and the businesses of India know not to trust the government and provide their own backup power generation for when the government fails them.
Here in the U.S. the clueless masses are prepared for nothing. Three days without power and people would be dying, rioting and begging for their government to save them. Anyone who thinks our electrical grid and underground water infrastructure isn’t crumbling and on the verge of collapse is living in a fantasy world. Three water main pipes have broken in Phila in the last two weeks creating enormous sinkholes and flooding hundreds of homes. The costs will be in the millions. Government has failed again. They spent your tax dollars on useless welfare and warfare, while our infrastructure deteriorated and now crumbles before our very eyes. And guess what. There is no money left to invest. It’s gone.
So don’t be so smug when reading about the problems of other countries. We have a few.
India sets back-to-back blackout records
Wednesday, August 1,2012
India is more and more often being held up to us as a nation that has embraced the computer age and run with it. At least that’s what the outfits that outsource jobs to Bangalore tell us.
But the next time you’re talking to “Chad” or “Ashley” on the help desk, that IT person may be working his laptop by candlelight and praying that the battery holds out until your problem is solved or his shift ends.
On Tuesday, India experienced the largest power outage in the history of electricity when 670 million, nearly one of every 10 people in the world, was suddenly blacked out.
The second greatest blackout was Monday when 300 million people, one-fourth of the country, were left in the dark. More than 500 trains abruptly came to a halt, and there was massive gridlock when the traffic lights quit working.
Indian drivers, who are said to take an unstructured approach to driving, might have said, “Traffic lights? We have traffic lights?”
One-fourth of the country, 300 million, missed the blackout altogether because they don’t have electricity in the first place.
Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry, was quoted as saying, “The developments of yesterday and today have created a huge dent in the country’s reputation that is most unfortunate.”
“Dent?” Crater would be more like it. The Washington Post observed, “Along with a lack of investment in infrastructure, the crisis also had roots in many of India’s familiar failings: the populist tone of much of its politics, rampant corruption in its government and public sector, weak law enforcement, and a maze of regulations that restrict many industries.”
One of them is a limit on mining India’s abundant reserves of coal, leaving many coal-fired generating plants chronically short of fuel.
News accounts say populist politicians force the power companies to sell power to favored customers at less than the cost of producing it, and then farmers, who get free power for irrigation, turn around and sell the electricity to local factories.
Meanwhile, somewhere between 24 percent and 40 percent of the power is lost in transmission because of inefficiency and theft.
Various explanations for the outage were offered. The most common was that the individual Indian states, in violation of the laws and regulations, simultaneously began drawing more than their share of power from the grid.
My favorite, if only for its beguiling honesty, was an official in the New Delhi power department, who said, “We are absolutely clueless why this happened again today.”
The blackouts would seem to call for a major increase in generating capacity but one that the government seems incapable of providing. India’s great rival as an emerging power is China, but, as The Wall Street Journal noted, “In recent years, China has added six times more power than India to its grid annually.”
It’s probably not the source of the problem but it’s worth noting that as the lights were going out all over northern India, the power minister was being promoted to the much more important post of home affairs minister.
We might point out that the worst blackout in the United States, 50 million people in the Northeast, happened when a couple of untrimmed trees brushed against some power lines in Ohio. And regularly in the national capital trees fall on the power lines and tens of thousands of people are left without power for days.
We here in the United States have mastered the art of a steady power supply. It’s the trees that stump us.
Dale McFeatters is a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service.
TeresaE says:
“…“Dent?” Crater would be more like it. The Washington Post observed, “Along with a lack of investment in infrastructure, the crisis also had roots in many of India’s familiar failings: the populist tone of much of its politics, rampant corruption in its government and public sector, weak law enforcement, and a maze of regulations that restrict many industries…”
Oh dear gawd.
Washington Post reporters are so aware of their own world.
That paragraph describes US just as well as it describes India.
FUBAR. And look out for those trees!
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2nd August 2012 at 3:04 pm
Administrator says:
Philadelphia’s third water main break in 10 days floods Front and Tioga
By Catherine Lucey
Daily News Staff Writer
IS THERE something in the water? City workers were mopping up Wednesday after the city’s third water-main break in 10 days. Early in the morning, a nearly 100-year-old main burst, flooding the area around Front and Tioga streets in North Philadelphia.
Millions of gallons of water have poured into the streets because of main breaks in recent days. Crews are still cleaning up from a massive main break that occurred 11 days ago at 21st and Bainbridge streets in Southwest Center City.
A smaller break in the Northeast, at Willits Street and Ashton Road, occurred on Sunday and has been fixed.
So is this a big surge in breaks in the city’s extensive network of steel pipes and water mains? Despite the recent leaks, officials say main breaks have not picked up in pace.
There were 965 breaks between July 1, 2010, and June 30, 2011, and just 531 between July 1, 2011, and June 30, 2012, said Debra McCarty, the Water Department’s deputy commissioner for operations. And the city is well below the national average for main breaks.
Still, Philadelphia has an old water system. According to McCarty, the 3,100 miles of pipe in the city have an average age of 67 years.
The main that broke Wednesday dates back to 1906. She also noted that the system is put under additional stress during extreme weather, like the recent heat.
“Higher uses in the summer causes additional stress on the piping. It has been a hot summer. It could be a result of that,” said McCarty, who said the cause for Wednesday’s break was still unknown. “We have water-main breaks every day of the year.”
Mayor Nutter recently called on the federal government to better fund city infrastructure projects, like shoring up the city’s water system.
The city spends about $50 million a year to replace pipes and replaced 68.6 miles of pipe between 2006 and 2011, according to McCarty. She said that the city is working as aggressively as possible with the money available and noted that the city’s pipe-replacement rate is faster than the national average.
But McCarty said that the city could replace pipes more quickly, at less cost to local taxpayers, with more state or federal aid.
The city plans to raise water rates 28.5 percent over the next four years, starting in October, in part to cover the costs of supporting the aging system.
“If there was more money available, that would help; we’re doing with what we have,” McCarty said.
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2nd August 2012 at 3:13 pm
Administrator says:
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2nd August 2012 at 3:14 pm
Administrator says:
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2nd August 2012 at 3:15 pm
Administrator says:
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2nd August 2012 at 3:16 pm
Persnickety says:
Sounds like a great reason to reduce your power consumption and install some alternative generation – like solar, or wind, or a propane backup generator (not the green choice).
From a power consumption perspective, US housing is incredibly stupid. For 4000+ years people have been building houses that get heat from the sun, cool from natural breezes, and dig into the earth to moderate their temperature swings. See many of those in the US?
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2nd August 2012 at 3:17 pm
Colma Rising says:
With a massive pipeline blast that killed one of my friend’s cousin at 20 years old with so much ahead in her life in the back of my mind, I am telling you:
That we don’t have a state-of-the-art, model of safe, efficient infrastructure with a national debt as high as it is remains a near-criminal indictment of priority and a sad testimony to the utter dysfunction of our system.
We pave over death with substandard concrete daily.
A fucking disgrace.
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2nd August 2012 at 3:19 pm
Maddie's Mom says:
I’m having a smidge of anxiety here as our triple-digit heat wave and drought just goes on and on. (It’s 109 here.)
Fingers crossed that the grid can take the unrelenting demand.
Water is becoming a concern here too. Voluntary water restrictions are in place and if we don’t get rain in about 20 days, we may be seeing mandatory rationing along with boil orders.
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2nd August 2012 at 3:37 pm
ThePessimisticChemist says:
Imminent collapse isn’t as horrible in my area as others. Going without power would suck, but I’m closed to multiple sources of fresh water, and this area is rural enough that farming is a distinct possibility.
I can’t imagine what it would be like for those poor bastards living out in the desert. No power is a death sentence for them.
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2nd August 2012 at 4:37 pm
AWD says:
Admin sayz: “The costs will be in the millions” I beg to differ, .
“According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, $2.2 trillion dollars is needed just to repair critical infrastructure in the United States.”
That’s just repair, not upgrade or improve. Too bad the government and Fed have given banksters and Wall Street close to $9 trillion.
Admin,
Did those sink holes do some good and suck up a few 30 blocks residents?
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2nd August 2012 at 7:16 pm
Administrator says:
AWD
I just meant the cost from the 3 water main breaks in Phila.
I agree that it would take trillions to upgrade our national infrastructure.
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2nd August 2012 at 7:54 pm
Chicago999444 says:
$2.2 Trillion is almost trivial beside the $6 Trillion in direct and indirect “shadow” bailouts for the housing market and the banks.
I pay taxes so I can have good infrastructure and civic interface. These are the things our taxes are for. $2.2 Trillion spent on repair of essential large infrastructure would pay us back many, many times over in increased competitiveness and saved lives… .while the $6 Trillion or more ( and who even KNOWS how much more) spent on subsidies for homeowners, and housing and bank bailouts has only rewarded crooks and fools, kept housing unaffordable to lower-wage people by keeping prices artificially elevated, and increased the disparity in incomes, while diverting valuable investment capital to asset inflation and ever more mal-investment in unneeded houses, and away from the new industries that could give us a future with a variety of good jobs, and a modern, technological society, in the fuel-short future.
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2nd August 2012 at 8:35 pm
Punk in Drublic says:
Three fucking days without TBP? Yeah, I’d be pissed off and rioting.
Government bastards better have that shit back up and running for Friday Fail.
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2nd August 2012 at 9:43 pm
AKAnon says:
“I just meant the cost from the 3 water main breaks in Phila.” I agree with your assessment of millions, Admin, but not 2 or 3 mil, more likely 10s of millions.
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2nd August 2012 at 10:17 pm
IndenturedServant says:
MM, get yourself a Berkey water filter and some food grade, poly containers or bladders to store some extra in case things get bad.
When I lived in the UK in the early 90′s, many OAP’s (old age pensioners) would siphon or pump bathwater outside to use in the garden. They had known hard times and were very frugal.
I_S
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2nd August 2012 at 12:52 am
Chicago999444 says:
To TPC, you name the reason people shouldn’t be living out in the middle of the desert…… or in the middle of the coastal CA firebelt, or in other environments that require many extra costs to make habitable for humans and supply them with basic necessities on a daily basis.
In the absence of cheap, readily available liquid fuels AND a large body of affluent taxpayers willing to ante up for things that do them no good and only increase their costs, it will quickly become impossible to sustain large communities of 2,000, 000 people or more on the high desert, or mobilize hundreds of fire-fighters plus C-17 planes to fight 10-mile long forest fires to save a relative handful of expensive homes, just as it will become impossible for tens of millions of people to live in places where they have to run 3 autos per household and commute 50 miles or more in each direction daily just to live.
How much more does it cost per household does it cost to supply water to places like Phoenix or Las Vegas, than it would St. Louis, Cincinnati, or Detroit? How much more does it cost to fight a firestorm when you are not just fighting a wide-ranging battle with the fire but also have to protect individual houses when the flames spread 5 ft per second and temps reach 2000 degrees? Yet we destroyed these old “organic” cities with their extremely favorable locations, selected for their proximity to fresh water, easy water transport, and fertile hinterlands, using the wealth they generated to build cities that are unlivable on any terms if fuel becomes even moderately more expensive or the droughts longer and more frequent.
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2nd August 2012 at 7:10 am
DaveL says:
How about privatizing the infrastructure?
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2nd August 2012 at 12:20 pm
Chicago999444 says:
Unfortunately won’t work, Dave.
It might work for tollways, in fact DOES work for limited access, less-than-absolutely necessary infrastructure.
But there is no way to “privatize” streets and road necessary for ingress and egress, sidewalks, sewers, or water works without compromising their quality and accessibility, and making them much costlier to the public. Look no further than our rapidly privatizing penal system, and you can figure out just EXACTLY why the prison -for-profit lobby is lobbying to make more things crimes, and more crimes punishable by imprisonment. Look what privatizing parking meters did to Chicago. Or what it did to the water supply in Atlanta in the 80s.
All privatization of public works is, is an opportunity for a profiteering corporation to get a lock on a highly lucrative captive market, and deliver the worst service for the highest price, for guaranteed profits from a captive public that cannot decide to go elsewhere.
What we truly need is a very firm boundary between the civic realm and the private realm. Those that belong to the civic realm are those essential civic functions that a community will literally collapse without and that cannot be performed for a profit, or without a gross conflict of interest, by a private business. Private functions are those that cannot be performed by the government because they impose the extremely high costs of some on others, are not necessary, or require too many fine-tuned choices that can be made only by parties dealing with their own money and considering their own needs and desires.
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2nd August 2012 at 4:26 pm
Maddie's Mom says:
IS,
I’m on it.
But I’m looking at this one instead:
http://www.aquarain.com/
Made in Missouri, USA!!!
What do you think?
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2nd August 2012 at 6:27 pm