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Electric utilities are the targets of lawsuits on a continuious basis. Every TV that dies, every Toaster that quits working is our fault.
A few year ago we were sued because a young man climbed over an eight foot fence topped with three strands of barbed wire, ignoring all the large, red and black signs that warned of dangerous high voltage equipment. He then climbed up on a transformer and grabbed two of the terminals in a suicide attempt. The energy blew him off the transformer. He lived and we were sued for his medical care for the rest of his life.
How was this our fault?
I won't take up for the money grubbing management of many of the utilities. These are the bastards that will charge the consumers for the cost of the blackout. You aren't about to see the stockholders give up a penny. They are already crying about how much money they lost on this deal and management will do whatever it takes to make them happy and protect their own overpaid positions.
Blaming the operators for non-working alarms is wrong. It again goes back to management and penny pinching bullshit. I work for a cooperative that is non-profit and yet this penny pinching by management goes on. Known problems are put off or ignored just like the not working alarms discussed here. Tree trimming also falls under penny pinching.
Much as I dislike how parts of my business are ran, these lawyers are still just a bunch of bottom feeding slime worms looking for that extra free money. The money isn't free, it will come from the very customers they claim will benefit from this. Only the LAWYERS will benefit in the long run. They will get the lions share of the money and then the utility will up the cost of electricity to cover their loss.
Only the customer loses.
One thing that eveyone needs to think about is this. The electric grid in the United States is the largest and most complex thing ever built by man. It was also built with no plan, it just grew as the population did. People like myself spend our careers attempting to make this machine work while others patch, repair, re-engineer and otherwise try to make it as efficent and safe as possible.
People that move to the country and start building want power, and they want it now, and they want it cheap, and they don't want to hear about what kind of problems they may be causing.
Since the industry was de-regulated Power Marketers have started moving large amounts of power around the country with no regard to the system. Only the almighty dollar counts. I heard on the news that this had nothing to do with the outage. I and others in my field are still laughing till tears roll down our faces at that. And the public is probably buying this story.
Yes, it shouldn't have happened. Engineers work for years trying to make it all fail safe and get it to all work together.
It's the real world folks, shit happens to even the best engineering and planning. This is some complex crap we work with and it gets deeper every day. I've been doing this for almost 20 years now and I learn new stuff every day.
Sorry about the rant. Between the media, lying two faced politicians, lawyers, and crappy management I get all I can take at times.
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Only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you,
Jesus Christ and the American G. I.
One died for your soul, the other for your freedom
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