‘People can’t live like this,” said a reader sitting in the dark in Park Ridge. “I’ve [had my power] down five times in a year, I’ve wasted I don’t know how many hundreds of dollars of food. We’re down again today from a little wind and rain that lasted a total of six minutes. Their service is horrendous. They will not give you an answer. It’s outrageous what we go through. Last time I was down three days, now I may be down three or four days. It’s not the Middle Ages. Maybe you can do something.”
You heard the lady, ComEd, get on the stick and get the power back, right now, particularly in Park Ridge.
I wish it were that easy. With tremendous winds scouring the Chicago region Monday, and centuries-old trees snapping like breadsticks, it didn’t come as a shock that more than 800,000 people lost electrical power.
By Tuesday it had been whittled down to 250,000, cold comfort if you are among the quarter million.
Not to be an apologist for ComEd, but they’re bringing in hundreds of crews, from as far away as Pennsylvania and Iowa, and seem to be trying to get things back in order.
It isn’t as if they can just pull up to a block, locate the power cord that got jiggled out by the storm and plug it back in. It’s a big job.
“Because of the intensity of the storm — high winds, heavy rain, very intense lightning — we had some significant damage, power lines down, transformers damaged,” said Tony Hernandez, a spokesman for ComEd. “We had a lot of tree damage, with broken trees bringing down power lines.”
He didn’t have stats for Monday, yet, but in the June 21 storm “miles and miles of overhead wire” had to be replaced.
Could the system be built more sturdily to better withstand storms? Sure. You could cut down all the trees anywhere near power lines, though many would hate that — I sure would.
You could bury the power lines. Communities nationwide are encouraging that, passing ordinances that any new road construction include buried power and telephone lines.
The trouble is, that burying electrical lines when you’re not already putting in new roads costs a lot, especially in a city, from 10 to 15 times as much as stringing them — up to $1 million a mile. Burying lines on a grand scale could double electrical costs to consumers.
And then underground power lines are not immune from damage — they don’t blow down in storms, but they do suffer from seepage and corrosion and get accidentally dug up.
I’ll admit a bias — I tend to be amazed that this stuff works as well as it does. Then again, my electricity isn’t out.
Electrical outages follow a certain pattern. When the house first goes dark, there’s a definite “Ooo, a crisis!” excitement, a rush to get candles and flashlights. A brief outage was not without benefit; not long ago, power outages had the advantage of darkening the TV and computers, and the family would look up, blinking and notice these other people living in the house with them. Now, the power goes out, the boys just grunt and reach over for their iPads and SmartPhones, like drunks switching to Sterno when the cheap wine runs out, and sit there in the dark, the blue light playing against their slack-jawed faces.
Overnight isn’t a problem. It’s night, it’s supposed to be dark. You go to sleep. Sure, there’s no air-conditioning, but it cools off at night, at least somewhat. It’s manageable.
By the next day, however, impatience sets in, a “Why doesn’t anybody DO anything” indignation, quickly building to the kind of fist-pounding outrage that prompted my Park Ridge reader to call me, unaware that, in situations where any kind of assistance is required, I am Ugarte, the Peter Lorre character arrested at the start of Casablanca. (“I’m looking for a man by the name of Ugarte,” says heroic resistance fighter Victor Laszlo sidling up to the bar at Rick’s American Cafe. “He is supposed to help me.” “Ugarte cannot even help himself,” answered Berger, the Norwegian, with a sad shake of the head).
And by evening, with the 40 pounds of prime rib, not to mention that slice of wedding cake from 1983, slowly starting to defrost in the freezer in the basement, well, I’m surprised Charles Bronson never made a movie where a man loses power, loses a freezer full of venison from his last hunting trip with his dad, and then loses his mind and sets out on a rampage of revenge against indifferent electrical company officials.
Try not to blame ComEd too much. It isn’t as if they like this. And think how welcome dull old normalcy — you flip the switch, the lights come on — will be after this. Besides, there’s no choice. As the poet Thomas Campbell said, “To bear is to conquer our fate.”
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