11 Nov 2011, 0931 hrs.
Since I saw the first snowflakes in Leicester MA on Saturday October 29, 2011, 117 hours and 29 minutes have passed. Just shy of 5 full days and still there are tens of thousands of National Grid customers here in Central MA are without power. As bad as that is, the real story must include the well over 1 million customers in 7 different states who are still praying today will be the day their power is restored. This situation is unnacceptable on any level and I welcome the news leaders like Martha Coakley and Senator Brown are going to investigate the poor preperation and response to what amounted to be a severe snowstorm. Nothing more, nothing less. As far as storms go it was much less intense as forecast due to the lack of high winds expected. So why the tremendous headaches?
There seems to be a common theme in disaster response since Hurricane Katrina whereas the agencies and companies responsible for reacting fail to prepare properly or adequately to deal with the situations which arise. In the case of New Orleans it was simple. Money earmarked for levy improvements was spent elsewhere. In the case of this latest Northeast snowstorm, utlities like National Grid failed to maintain clearances between power lines and trees. They have failed miserably to update equipment and also made the poor decision to wait for the
storm to pass before calling in more resources.
To those who wish to defend the actions of those in charge, I want to point out there are people dying now due to the prolonged outages. It cannot be denied and no amount of spin will bring those victims back. This pattern is not new. We saw it with the ice storm of 2008, the tornados of this past Spring, Hurricane Irene and other weather related episodes in the past few years. Something has got to be done to change this culture of not being prepared in the
hopes things won't get too bad. It has not worked!
As for some suggestions, maybe we should hold the executives in charge more accountable for their decisions. Maybe we should also make the utilities pay for the shelters, lost food, overtime public safety pay, gas for the generators, and funeral costs of the victims too. At the least we need to pressure our Pols To hold hearings and not let this matter drop without getting some answers and changes.
