Are you guys ready for the apocalypse? Because it’s coming. And you can thank your local electric utility company for its contribution to it. In our case, that would be PG&E, the Pacific Gas and Electric company!
OK, maybe I’m being dramatic, but I might have to go without internet this summer for days at a time. What the hell am I going to do with my life? Interact with someone face-to-face?
Andy Caldwell might get a hitch in his COLAB (Coalition of Labor, Agriculture, and Business) giddy-up because I’m badmouthing one of its precious members, but I want to ask him something. Are you ready for your power to be off for more than 48 hours because the company that’s about to raise your electricity rates didn’t maintain its infrastructure and is all of a sudden worried about fire danger?
I would compare it to the county’s deferred maintenance backlog, which is more than $300 million at this point (Come on Santa Barbara County, get your shit together!), but PG&E is investor-owned and focused on profits and the county is funded by public dollars and doesn’t make a profit. I think PG&E’s shareholders should have taken some of those profits and invested it in the electrical grid!
PG&E seems to think that the county can handle “emergency shutoffs” of power with its emergency plans—even if the only one who deems it an emergency is PG&E. So, our hospitals will hopefully have enough generator fuel to get their patients on life-support through a utility-deemed “emergency” that could last more than 48 hours. And they’ll get through said “emergency” with a plan that the county Public Health Department set up to deal with real emergencies such as a natural disaster. So, what’s the plan for when there’s a real emergency that happens during the “emergency” power shut-off and there’s no way to get information to anybody?
Don’t panic, though, these little shut-offs will probably only happen in areas of the state that are considered to be Tier 3, or what the California Public Utilities Commission labels to have an extreme fire threat! Only the most populated areas of the county will be susceptible to those power outages, according to the commission’s trusty map—so, we’re all good!
Almost as good as all those homeless people that 4th District County Supervisor Peter Adam thinks are just high and drunk, enjoying the good life out on the streets! He seems to believe that blaming the state’s high cost of housing for some of the precipitous rise in homelessness is a red herring!
“I think there’s a much bigger component of this problem that’s attributable to drugs than we’re talking about,” Adam said during a June 18 hearing on a new plan to tackle homelessness in the county. “This isn’t a bunch of people that are just down on their luck.”
Yeah, um. Peter? You might want to talk to all of those tech company employees who are forced to live in RVs in the Bay Area because their six-figure salaries aren’t enough to afford a house.
The Canary supports affordable bird cages. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 20-27, 2019.