Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

the lack of calm after the storm

I just heard on the radio that two workers for BGE, one of the area power companies, were electrocuted while working on line repairs.

Damn. Obviously I don't have details (I couldn't even find a more in-depth account on the local online news), but I would not be surprised if it was merely a case of workers going through something too fast and taking some safety shortcuts.

Not surprisingly, people are enormously frustrated. (And it's easy for me to be objective, right, since I have power. For some reason, it's been during winter storms that I seem to lose mine. So while I'm not powerless now, I can relate.) The pressure is definitely on the utility workers. I'm worried about those guys.

It is the same story...right now people are demanding buried lines, trimmed trees, more equipment and staff. When the lights come back on, extra measures will be too expensive to justify and no, you better not touch that beautiful old tree...

As Victor and I drove up to Carroll County yesterday we saw a lot more trees down and a lot of intersections without traffic lights. Those are tricky. Of course everyone remembers the driver's ed instruction that you treat a dead traffic light like a stop sign, but when the intersection has twelve lanes instead of four, the flow of traffic is not quite so obvious. We did see a couple of accidents.

As a radio traffic reporter remarked, what Isabel didn't do to us, we do to each other, or to ourselves.

Posted by Nic at September 21, 2003 08:45 AM | TrackBack