Lessons not learned and not heeded

 

Commander Zero notes that while he's doing fine, many others in his part of Montana are still without power after a windstorm flattened power lines.  Among his blog articles about it, and its aftermath:

109-MPH winds

Still not outta the woods

More lessons

Who can’t afford fifteen cent water?

In the second article linked above, after mentioning several "lessons learned" by those who were not prepared, he concludes:

Will people learn anything from this? No. Invariably, they’ll tell their ‘war stories’ about how the suffered mightily and when I politely ask them if they’ll be buying generators or doing anything else to mitigate a repeat performance of the event they will say “Oh no, this sort of thing almost never happens”. Even though it just freakin’ happened.

And that, mi amigos y amigas, is why, collectively, we are doomed. People like you and I are outnumbered by orders of magnitude by these idiots. But they have the numbers and the collective gene pool of humanity will suffer because of it.

There's more at the link.  All four articles are worth reading.

Commander Zero's perspective is even more relevant when one takes into account the same situation arising elsewhere in the country.  Just look at Houston, Texas after Hurricane Beryl paid the area a visit earlier this month.

When Hurricane Beryl swept through southeast Texas on July 8, its damaging 80-mile-per-hour winds took down thousands of trees and knocked out much of the electricity system. More than 2.6 million Texas power customers went without electricity for days in the summer heat.

In the days that followed the storm, officials and residents alike turned their eyes to the Houston area’s electric utility, CenterPoint Energy. Texans criticized the company for failing to prepare adequately for the storm, communicate clearly with customers and restore power efficiently.

Gov. Greg Abbott threatened the company, legislators quickly called hearings about the outages and the state’s utility regulators launched an investigation. On July 25, the company's CEO apologized to customers and vowed to improve.

Again, more at the link.

Bear in mind that Hurricane Beryl blew through during high summer in Texas, where temperatures approaching or exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit are normal, and humidity levels along the Gulf Coast (where Houston lies) are as close to 100% as you'll find anywhere in these United States.  Even so, despite living with these realities year in, year out, literally millions of customers of power utilities found themselves cut off, without having arranged access to backup power of any kind.  They stayed that way for up to ten days.  (There are reports that some isolated sites are still without power.)  As a result, a number of heat-related deaths have been reported, as well as at least hundreds (perhaps thousands) of heat-related medical emergencies.  Why were they not better prepared, despite having experienced this so often before?

Those living in hurricane- or tornado-prone areas are accustomed to seeing long convoys of power company trucks coming in after such disasters to answer calls for help from local utilities, or heading out again after doing so.  Yet, this time round, there were fewer of them headed for Houston.  I wondered why, and called a buddy of mine who works for a major Texas utility.  His answer was grim.  He stated bluntly that the national supply of essential high-capacity spare parts for the power grid - transformers, junction boxes, insulators, etc. - is at what he thinks may be an all-time low, thanks to supply chain problems and companies being unwilling to invest a lot of money in maintaining a large emergency reserve supply.  Even worse, in some states, if utilities do stock up on such backup supplies, they'll be subject to inventory tax, making them in many cases unaffordable.  As a result of all those factors, there simply aren't enough of such parts to send to a disaster area without risking dangerous shortages in the places that sent them - and utility companies can't afford that risk.

To add to the problem, he pointed out that there are fewer and fewer skilled, experienced linemen willing to travel long distances and work under conditions of extreme discomfort, again and again, all summer long.  The old hands are retiring;  many of the newcomers don't have enough experience to handle the work on their own;  and many simply don't want to work in broiling heat and sweltering humidity non-stop for days and weeks at a time.  They won't accept such assignments.

My friend summarized by warning me to expect longer and longer delays in power being restored in such disaster areas, and "ripple effects" in non-disaster-affected areas (including my own) as the relatively few experienced staff grow fewer in number.  When I mentioned Commander Zero's posts about the Montana power outage to him, he went to read them for himself, then called back to say that utilities there were probably in exactly the same situation he'd described here.  I can't confirm that, of course, but being in the industry, he may well have the right of it.

Certainly, looking at the average levels of disaster preparation I see all around me, there's plenty of room for concern.  I know many people who've invested in a generator, but they've never tested it, or if they have at least switched it on, they've never actually connected essential household appliances to it, or tested it under full load.  Their multi-thousand-watt generator may look and sound lovely, but if they add up their normal household electric power consumption - HVAC, water heater, freezers and refrigerators, and so on - the total power demand may considerably exceed the generator's maximum power rating.  They're going to have to figure out what to switch off if their generator is to help them.

Worse, many of them have two or three 5-gallon gasoline containers for it:  but their generator may have a fuel consumption of well over a gallon per hour under heavy load (which is why many generator manufacturers misleadingly quote fuel consumption under half-load conditions, which looks and sounds much better).  They're going to run through those containers of fuel in no more than a day or two - but if the gas stations nearby don't have power, they're not going to be able to refill them.  The same goes for lubricating oil.  Generators are hard on the stuff, and typically require oil changes more frequently than other small engines;  but if you don't have it available, how are you going to do that?  What about spare spark plugs, etc.?  Murphy's Law applies doubly to essential, indispensable equipment like generators.

Most of us aren't doing enough to be properly prepared;  and many of us (including yours truly) who are better prepared than most, still have "holes" in our preparations that could use filling.  We need to be reminded of that by people like Commander Zero and those who go through current or recent emergency situations, so we can be jolted out of our complacency, and check and double-check our own situation in the light of their experiences, and rectify what needs fixing.

Peter