IRENE: Hundreds of Thousands Still Without Power

Hundreds of thousands of people are STILL without power after IRENE. And they are "mad as hell." We understand.

We went through that after Hurricane IKE hit Houston in 2008 - two days after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and the financial collapse started.  We missed all of it.

It was weird. The rest of the world knew what was going on but none of us without power had a clue. I spent a week without it and that was long enough. Some people had to wait two weeks or more. It gets OLD fast - no TV news, no power for your cell phone, no A/C to cool off.

It was like being marooned on another planet. All we could do was sit around and wait for grocery stores to reopen and gas stations to get power so the pumps would work to get gas. Until then, we had to eat canned food since the freezer food had melted or spoiled.

And just like then, when electric workers came from all kinds of states to help us get powered up, the same is happening in the Northeast.

We are still doing things the "old" way - stringing power lines on poles, next to trees, which fall on the poles in a storm and knock out the juice. Or, in the north, ice gets on the lines, and they break.

In Texas this summer we are going through the worst drought on record. In the process, we discovered that the lack of rain leads to salt build up on the power lines, which causes them to short out! To prevent it, they were spraying water on the lines, sometimes with helicopters, to keep them working.

It's time we got into the 21st Century with our electrical grid. It needs to be put underground where trees and droughts will not knock out electricity.  The "cheap" way of doing things is not always the best, or the smartest.

If you don't think so, try going a week or two without power after a storm....