Posted on 11/14/2012 6:25:09 AM PST by Jim Noble
It was four days before Hurricane Sandy would arrive, and trustees of the Long Island Power Authority gathered as forecasters’ warnings grew dire. For more than two hours, the trustees talked about a range of issues, including a proposal to hire a branding consultant.
Discussion of the storm lasted just 39 seconds...
The examination by The Times shows that the Long Island Power Authority has repeatedly failed to plan for extreme weather...
Officials, including Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, have excoriated the authority, but in the past, they have paid little attention to its management...
Trying to fend off attacks on his oversight of the Long Island Power Authority, Mr. Cuomo on Tuesday established a high-level panel, called a Moreland Commission, to investigate how utilities across New York, including the authority, handled Hurricane Sandy and other storms.
He also revived a proposal that he made in his 2010 campaign to combine the authority with other state energy agencies, but has not ruled out privatizing the authority...
In many ways, the Long Island Power Authority, known as LIPA, reflects the shortcomings of the state’s quasi-independent public authorities, which are often criticized as a shadow government that resists scrutiny. Long Island is the only region of New York where the main electrical utility is run by the government.
While oversight has drifted, politicians have installed relatives and friends in executive positions at the authority, turning it into a rich source of patronage jobs, according to interviews and a review of state records.
These positions have an average salary of $110,000, the records show.
“There are many, many people who have been placed at LIPA during my tenure here who have no utility experience or training in the job that they have been placed in,” said Tracy Burgess-Levy, the authority’s director of community relations...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Can the lamestream media say”Katrina”?
Last night, on I-95 just north of Savannah ... Streams of utility work trucks, with yellow lights flashing ...all headed SOUTH! With all the outages still happening for Sandy, why are all these trucks heading south? (Turned away?)
when the non union power crews got run off a lost all sympathy for new england
There should be a huge headline on LI -
YOUR UNIONS AT WORK! TURNING AWAY NON-UNION HELP AND SUPPLIES ON NON-UNION TRUCKS FROM OTHER STATES - so you can go without power for weeks!
That’s a rhetorical question, right?
“While oversight has drifted, politicians have installed relatives and friends in executive positions at the authority, turning it into a rich source of patronage jobs, “
....which is exactly what will happen with ObamaCare. Doing without power is bad, but you or your family members will die from malfeasance in the government-run health care system.
I think they are down from an initial outage number of 8 million to something like 100,000. The last 100,000 can be handled by local crews. I believe the holdup is that the still-affected areas are so devastated that other non-line crew work has to take place before the power can be reconnected.
There was this Morning on FoxNews a report stating word to the effect that some of the out af area electrical work crew said that “bubble-gum-and-bailing-wire” would be a optimistic assesment of what they saw in Long Island. They said that they didn’t know how this EVER worked.
This, to me, is the worst part of this story. CAN YOU JUST FU**ING IMAGINE if Bush, or Romney, were President what a noise there would be about this still ongoing disaster?
As a smarter than I FReeper pointed out, all those underground electric systems are going to have problems because of the salt that got into them. It might take weeks or months but they will degrade.
Ya can baffle 'em with BS, until the lights go out.
Private power companies were forced out of business by the federal government under the reign of FDR via the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).
Now we have quasi-governmental, monopolistic power companies that really don't care about the customers because they don't have to.
Compare/contrast public education.
What people do not realize that LIPA’s failure is a failure of government, LIPA is NOT a company, but a “a municipal subdivision of the State of New York” and a monopoly.
From wikipedia:
“The Long Island Power Authority or LIPA [ “lie-pah” ], a municipal subdivision [1] of the State of New York, was created under the Long Island Power Act of 1985 to acquire the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO)’s assets and securities. A second Long Island Power Authority (LIPA), a wholly owned subsidiary of the first, acquired LILCO’s transmission and distribution system in May 1998.
LIPA, a non-profit municipal electric utility, owns the retail electric system on Long Island and provides electric service to over 1.1 million customers in Nassau and Suffolk counties, and the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. LIPA does not own any electric generation assets on Long Island, and it does not provide natural gas service. “
They won't understand.
Yes, “DMV style” healthcare.
They will unionize the medical industry and it will resemble the quality and professionalism of public education.
When we had a disaster in Texas - hurricane Ike - there was one, single minded mission to re-establish civilization. Our Governor (like others on the Gulf) had plans of cooperation with other electric companies to restablish power and services. They came in large carrivans from all along the coast into Texas and it still took a few weeks before everyone had service. We had hotels set up in advance for them to stay in and coordiate their work. There was no other “interest” other than fixing what was broken as professionally and quickly as possible. People appreciated this and showed this respect to those workers who slaved long hours to make things right again.
The same with garbage collection services. All planned out ahead of time and workers showed their commitment to rescuing the victims from the awfulness of the disaster; working long, hard hours. They were treated like heros. Everyone remembers them and their sacrifice.
All these guys made A LOT of money along the way as should be. But that came along as a natural consequence to their professional mission of restoration.
This is a totally foreign culture to the Sandy victims where greedy union workers and mindless resenting residents - blame and hate, hate, and hate. So sad. It’s going to be broken for a long time. The spirit of survival is dead in multicutlurally cleansed humanist societies. New York has an edgy, cool culture; but cool has nothing to do with disaster recovery. It’s the opposite.
I wonder how things would be going if Shoreham had ever come on line.
Either there would be plenty of power right now, or the idiots in charge would have FUBAR'ed everything in the past 30 years and it'd be another Japan. (Sadly, probably the latter.)
I beg to differ.
I lived in central Nassau County from 1954-68. During that time, there were five major hurricanes, including Carol, Donna, and Esther. The last two rearranged the inlets on the barrier beaches and knocked down power lines all over the place.
LILCO never, never, NEVER had problems restoring power like these clowns.
LIPA is what happens when Democrats take over.
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