Friday, September 9, 2011

Power Plays

The next time someone tells you infrastructure spending in the US is wasted and unecessary and the free market will fix everything if we just deregulate all utilities, please remind them of the this story.

More than 2 million people on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border were left without power Thursday after a major outage that extended from Arizona to southern California, including San Diego, the eighth largest U.S. city.

Mike Niggli, chief operating officer of San Diego Gas & Electric Co. ruled out terrorism but said the cause is unclear.

"To my knowledge this is the first time we've lost an entire system," he said at a news conference.

The outage that started shortly before 4 p.m. PDT extended from southern parts of Orange County to San Diego to Yuma, Arizona. It also is affecting cities south of the border across much of the state of northern Baja.

All outgoing flights from San Diego's Lindbergh Field were grounded and police stations were using generators to accept emergency calls across San Diego County.

Charles Coleman, a spokesman from Southern California Edison, said the two reactors at the San Onofre nuclear power plant went offline at 3:38 p.m. as they are programmed to do when there is a disturbance in the power grid, but there was no danger to the public or to workers there.

Residents in parts of eastern San Diego County and Yuma, Ariz. endured sweltering temperatures with no air conditioning.

But remember, spending money to shore up our increasingly aging power grid and water systems in the US is "wasteful union thuggery".   Extreme heat from climate charge and a system getting older every day means you will see more and more of this happening throughout the US in the months and years ahead.

Gosh, if there were only a million or so unemployed people we could put to work on projects improving these infrastructure systems across the country...

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