[nycbug-talk] Post-Hurricane Roll Call

[Charles Sprickman]

On Nov 12, 2012, at 12:42 AM, Kurt Miller wrote:

> On Saturday 03 November 2012 7:24:12 am Richard Thornton wrote:
>> This disaster is  30% storm, 70% sub par infrastructure in ny, nj.  This is
>> a joke, 5 days no electricity in Princeton area over a wind??? Amazing!!
> 
> I'll see your 5 days and raise you to 13 days no power in Port Washington.

Got mine yesterday, 12 days, JCP&L almost hit the two week mark.

The actual on the ground work required to get my place plus a townhome development back was under a day.  The time required to get a few hundred downstream customers up was an additional two days.  So 9 days of no work + 3 days of work = 12 day outage.

> There are many on Long Island still without power somewhere around 20-30%
> of customers although that might go down to 10% if you believe LIPA in two
> more days.

There was a great story about how antiquated LIPA's tracking system was on WNYC.  They even noted that it runs on COBOL which I think they called a "primitive" programming language that "runs on mainframes".

> What has happend here make me think of Atlas Shrugged. :-

Makes me think that loosely regulated utilities will cut costs at every opportunity in an utterly selfish pursuit of profits that's somehow justified by a smug reassurance that they are the chosen "makers", but I'm a socialist commie. :)  We could all build our own generation plants I suppose...

Seriously though, at least with JCP&L (First Energy), they have been posting great profits while cutting costs... meaning: reduced staff, less maintenance, fewer spares of everything on-hand, consolidation across their various territories for better "efficiency" that breaks down when large-scale storms hit, and the service level and MTTR is getting worse each year.

Charles

> -Kurt
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