Hildegarde

It’s Monday, November 7th, and I can say with some certainty that although I spent most of the last week sleeping–because there was virtually nothing else to do–I am completely exhausted.

For those of you who have not been following the news, or don’t know I live in Connecticut, we had a freak snow storm last week, eight inches of the stuff on October 29th.

The snow started in the late morning and fell hard and fast all day, but possibly not as hard as I thought it did. I do live in New England.  We get many absolute beauts of the things, often a couple of feet or so on and off throughout January, February and early March.

But we only got eight inches, and those eight inches somehow managed to leave almost a million people without power across the state of Connecticut.

That was on Saturday, October 29th.  My power went out at 7:19 pm.

On Tuesday, we threw out every single thing in our refrigerator.  On Wednesday, we threw out everything in both our freezers. 

My power came back on on Saturday, November 5th at 10:59 pm.

Tthat’s eight days and more than three and a half hours without light, heat, computer, hot water, or landline–and the cell phones screwed up for three days.

And, as I type this, there are still “thousands” of people without power in the state. 

I write “thousands” like that, in quotes, because I can’t seem to find a place where CL&P, the utility involved, is actually admitting to a hard number this morning. 

This may have something to do with the fact that the company spent the last week insisting that it would have 99% of its electricity-deprived customers back up and running by midnight last night night, only to hit yesterday morning with a press conference saying that, well, okay, maybe…Wednesday.

There are school districts in this state that have been closed for a week already and that did not open again today. 

There are situations in some towns that are downright frightening.  In Vernon, at least as of yesterday afternoon, there was a neighborhood that had not only been without power for more than a week, but that was impassible to anybody, including emergency vehicles.  Downed wires were stretched across the road and still live, so that it wasn’t safe to step over them or to drive vehicles over them.

All attempts to shut the electricity off altogether seemed to have failed, and there was an elderly woman who needed daily oxygen and hadn’t been able to get it.

Several of the smaller water systems have been contaminated, so that you have people living in houses without electricity who have been told to boil their water, and who can’t.

I do, now, have power–obviously, since I’m writing this–but I also have some observations:

1) This was an eight inch snowstorm.  Eight inches. That’s nothing up here in the winter.  As I said above, we routinely get a foot or more every week in the winter. 

And granted, this was unusual not only because of the time of year, but because there were leaves on the trees and that caused a lot of tree damage.

But still.  If CL&P can’t get the power back up for over a week on eight inches, what’s going to happen the first week of March, when we usually get our big nor’easter, with two feet and more? 

2) There was a time when people who were hired to be corporate public relations people had to know something about public relations.   That time seems to have passed.

Toyota and BP were bad enough, but watching CL&P’s public relations performance over the past week has been stunning.

There was, first, the constant assurances, starting the Sunday morning after the great Saturday blackout, that the company was “assessing the damage” and would have power restored no later than midnight on November 6th.

The “assessing the damage” thing sounded a lot like “we haven’t actually done anything yet, and you might as well not get your hopes up about getting power back soon, because we haven’t even started.”

This was, by the way, pretty much what was happening, so that actual operations on the ground didn’t even begin until sometime Monday. 

Never mind the fact that the projection was, in fact, insane. 

And the time it’s actually taking is even more insane.

3) As the days went by, the state government and everybody else began to get thoroughly angry, and they seem to have had a right to.

The story presently circulating in the local press is that CL&P was unable to get outside contractor crews to come in and help with the mess because it had either failed to pay many of those outside crews after they came in to help after Hurricane Irene.

Did I mention that?  There was a hurricane here–well, it was only a Tropical Storm by the time it hit the Long Island Sound, but it started as a hurricane–less than three months ago.

Some of the people now going without power for a week and a half, the ones that aren’t likely to be back up before Wednesday, also went without power for a week and a half during that.  My friends Carol and Richard lost power during Irene for eleven days, and they weren’t in the worst hit part of the state.

4) Part two of corporate PR incompetence was the constant announcement that clearing roads and downed wires was the first priority, followed by getting power back to businesses, government buildings and schools, so that residents could “access essential services.”

I have no idea who thought this would be received as good news, and the company behaving well. 

The fact was that the days during the past week have been rather nice, with temperatures in the high 50s and 60s.  The nights, on the other hand, have been brutal, the worst of them going down into the 20s.

So, with businesses up and running, what happened was that we all went to work during the nice part of the day when we could have survived pretty well without heat anyway, and then went home to cower under blankets and quilts until we could leave again in the morning.

Then there was the claim, made by company spokespeople, that the utility could not be blamed because it had no idea there would be so much snow.  You had to blame the local weather people, who hadn’t predicted it.

Not only was that lame, it was a lie–the weather people had actually been predicting more snow, and predicting it for a week.  I know.  I’m the original news junkie. 

All CL&P got for that piece of nonsense was constantly replayed clips of weather men across the local stations predicting twelve inches, fourteen inches, you name it. 

5) Half the hotels were also without power. The other half were booked up within hours, and generators were sold out across the state by Tuesday morning. 

At least one college in the Hartford area closed its doors and sent all its dorming students home for the duration.  As far as I know, they’re not up yet. 

6) Several groups of people have filed lawsuits against CL&P, and the state attorney general’s office has launched an investigation, as have the regulatory agencies. 

One of the people filing the lawsuit pointed out that he really had no other choice.  CL&P is a public utility and therefore a monopoly.  He couldn’t take his business elsewhere. 

Quite a few other people agree with my younger son, who wants something to happen that will personally affect people like Jeffrey Butler, CL&P’s COO, rather than the usual thing, which is just fining the company.

It’s a similar demand to the one made by both the Tea Party and OWS about the men at the head of the big banks and brokerage firms who got bailed out after the 2008 crash.

And it’s a policy proposal that has a lot of merit.  I had the same thought after Enron collapsed. 

You have, at this point, at least in certain segments of society, a culture of money.  In some of those segments–sports, say, or entertainment–irresponsibility just causes personal trouble and leaves the rest of us mostly alone.  In others–banks, and utilities, and like that–irresponsibility direly affects the rest of us.

For that segment, I say we change the laws so that if they blow things up, they lose, personally, their money.  If money is what they care about, then let’s go after that.

7) In spite of all this mess, many local municipalities are holding their elections tomorrow.  In pursuit of this, the roads are strewn with signs advocating for one political party or another.

One of these signs occurs at a major intersection I have to pass through on my way to and from school.  I get it right in front of me on the way home.  It’s a big, green thing with giant letters in white, and what it says is:  HAD ENOUGH YET?

It was–oh, I don’t know.  Perfect.  I hope the Indpendent Party wins a few seats on the strength of its having a prescient message for the times it is living through.

8) This is the longest period of time I’ve gone without writing since I was a teenager.  I’ve hated it.  I write even when I’m sick.

I’m glad to be back to it.

9) But first, I need to go out and replace $782.40 of food, medical supplies that aren’t safe if they’ve been too cold, and various and other sundries destroyed not by the storm, but by being without power for more than eight days.

I have a friend who says she’s getting all her receipts together and taking the money she’s out of pocket off her next few electric bills, but I know it won’t work.

That’s just going to make them shut off her power again.