Hot Hot Heat

The heatwave is finally over and thankfully, after 5 consecutive nights of being without electricity, I can again turn on a fan, or read by something other than candlelight. The temperatures got up to about 102 around here and apparently 26 people in the Los Angeles area died. Although it sucked not having power for several hours at a time, I thought about people in disaster areas like New Orleans and decided that between water and power, I would rather have water. During intense heat, you can at least jump in the bathtub.

Starting Friday, Tomoko called me to say that people were gathered outside my apartment and the place was dark. The power stayed off for several hours, and was interrupted again each day until Tuesday, lasting longer each time. Monday and Tuesday, we went dark around 5pm and did not have power restored until the following morning.

The odd (and infuriating) thing about it (as anyone standing on the street in the dark at night would have told you), was that it only seemed to be our side of the street that was affected for so many consecutive days. I took a stroll around Los Feliz on Tuesday night and the power was on everywhere else but our street. The neighbors directly across from us all had their lights on and their AC fans cranking away. I sat outside with some neighbors from my building and grumbled over brownout conspiracies and ground my teeth around the words ENRON and energy deregulation.

While it was a nuisance for us, I thought about MacArthur Park not having power for over 48 consecutive hours. Made up of mostly Spanish-speaking Latino immigrant families, they are not a community that is likely to lodge many effective complaints to the city. Was it possible that neighborhoods were selected by such criteria to lose power, thereby preventing an uncontrollable power outage in a more affluent and vocal part of the city? A kind of controlled burn? Gives new meaning to the term "brownout." I read an interview with a MacArthur Park woman who said that her food had spoiled and it was not within her family budget to replace it. There are also stories of elderly people on welfare dying because they were afraid of the energy bill that would come from running the AC for too long.

Amidst all this, there is the debate over whether global warming is "real." What I love most is that conservative thinkers who want us to pay for more power plants are the same people who say it's always been this hot. If that's so, why the hell are we blowing the power grid like never before? I think the answer is that some of those power plants that were taken off-line by ENRON during the California Gubernatorial Coup were never brought back online to full capacity (if at all).

I'm sorting through my fridge now and throwing away food that Tomoko, in all her loving maternal sweetness, bought and cooked for me, and that makes me bitter. I'm sure a lot of other people are more bitter. There's a cool breeze coming through the window now, so maybe all of our tempers will cool. Until, as my neighbor Tom thinks, we receive bills that are drastically higher next month, reflecting the costs of so many new lines and transformers that are being passed on to us. Seems like all the old infrastructure is really going to the dogs.

Time to crack open a skunky beer.

From the LA Times:
Blackout losses no sweat for utilities
Steaming over an abuse of power
This is absolutely miserable