Fallen

This is ridiculous. Everybody email these asshats and tell them what a bunch of leeching-off-society scumbags they are.

Article about a class action suit filed due to the black out

__________________
Overdosed on Apathy

Halx

Fallen, instead of JUST posting a link, THIS is what you're supposed to do - quote the article along with the link

__________________
You have found this post informative.
-The Administrator
[Don't Feed The Animals]

mydragonfido

Wow you can sue for anything these days!!!

Wile E

Well I don't agree is suing, nor am I happy with our sue-happy society. However, it pisses me off how these big businesses such as power companies can get away with murder. That blackout should never have happened. Because of their neglect, my cousins restaurant suffered more than 100,000 dollars in damage and lost goods. It might go under now. Yes insurance covers it, but that takes time and staying afloat until that time is not always doable.

I don't think a personal lawsuit is the right approach, but I do think the neglecting company should hold some responsibility for its actions. I don't want to hear "oops, we're sorry". This blackout has made my personal life misery. Do I want to sue and get paid because of it? No, but I wouldn't mind getting the satisfaction that the CEO that makes 30 mil a year, has to pay out a healthy sum in retribution charges. Or that the fat, lazy union workers that were responsible for the areas of neglect get tossed out on their worthless asses and not be protected by their bogus "I can never get fired no matter how useless I am" union contract.

__________________
"We got no food, no clothes...our pets HEADS ARE FALLIN' OFF!"

rogue49

you said it perfectly for me, wile.

good words, good thoughts.

Bill O'Rights

I think that Wile E has about a good a handle on this subject as you're gonna get.

__________________
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

Averett

Wait, they said they are suing on behalf of EVERYONE? I don't wanna sue, leave me out of it!

__________________
Absence is to love what wind is to fire. It extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.

Nefir

It sounds like they are not only suing on my behalf, but will they also receive the settlement or award on my behalf, and then spend it on my behalf too.

I want no part in this. What happened to cause the outage should have been prevented, but what I see above is downright theft. These vultures are taking advantage of peoples' fear and frustration in order to earn big $$$$. That just makes me sick.

__________________
You do not use a Macintosh, instead you use a Tandy
Kompressor break your glowstick, Kompressor eat your candy
Kompressor open jaws, Kompressor release ants
Kompressor watch you scream, Because Kompressor does not dance

BoCo

Lawyers, and the leftist judges who allow their lawsuits, are going to destroy America faster than any foreign force ever could.

__________________
Activism is a way for useless people to feel important.

KeyserSoze

Aren't we pretty much there already???

__________________
THERE IS NO KEYSER SOZE!!

Vyk

Class action lawsuits, where the lawyers get about 60% of the take. blah.

__________________
"Courage of the heart is very rare"

rockogre

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.

__________________
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

wwcd101

It seems to me the utilities find themselves operating somewhere between a competitive and non competitive environment. If their world was more competitive, they would do all the little things it takes to keep customers, like Wile E's cousin, happy. They would trim the trees.

We need to continue to move forward with deregulation.

At the same time, I think it's amazing it all works as well as it does.

Thanks for listening.

rockogre

Sorry, but I told you so.

consumers will eventually pay up to $50 billion in higher electric bills

Monday, August 18, 2003


Search is on for blackout trigger

Experts say focus will be on area around Cleveland, why fail-safe steps didn't work

By Ceci Connolly / Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- As the Bush administration dispatched crews to investigate the largest blackout in North American history, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham warned Sunday that consumers will eventually pay up to $50 billion in higher electric bills to modernize the nation's ailing power transmission system.

"Rate-payers, obviously, will pay the bill because they're the ones who benefit," he said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

Abraham declined to speculate on what triggered last week's cascading outages that left 50 million people without power, but other energy experts said it was increasingly apparent the failure began with power lines near Cleveland.

Less clear, said Michehl Gent, head of the North American Electric Reliability Council, is why the system's warning alarms did not catch and confine the problem to Northeastern Ohio.

"There were fail-safe steps in place, and they didn't work," he said on CNN's "Late Edition." In just three minutes Thursday afternoon, 21 power plants in six states stretching from New York to Michigan and into Canada crashed.

Gent, during several media interviews, suggested human error might have been responsible for the missed signals in Ohio. Energy executives there replied it was too early to tell.

"There has to be much more going on in the system than four downed lines," said Ralph DiNicola, spokesman for Akron's FirstEnergy Corp., which owns the northeastern Ohio lines that have been blamed for starting the chain reaction that led to the blackout.

The utility said Sunday there were problems, including strange voltage fluctuations, in the Midwest power grid hours before its transmission lines failed.

Alan Schriber of the Ohio Public Utilities Commission said investigators should not rule out the possibility multiple events triggered the blackout, creating "a perfect storm of electricity."

In Washington, several lawmakers renewed calls for the regional approach developed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). But Abraham suggested the White House would rather wait three years before considering creation of regional energy organizations to oversee delivery of power.

Instead, President Bush will press for enforceable reliability requirements and incentives to expand transmission capacity, Abraham said.

__________________
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

johnnymysto

Rockogre makes some very good points. While all the hoopla is going on about what happened to cause the outage, the management is only going to look for the scapegoat - someone they can point the finger at. Then, it will all be over. Like he said, the bottom line is what counts. What corporation CEO do you know who would work tirelessly to make sure this never happened again? Instead, they'll put a plan in place to placate the media, then go on about business.

To the point of this thread, suing is not the answer. But, some lawyer has seen an opportunity to get his name out there. Let's just pray that the judge ruling in the case has half a brain and kicks this thing out of court. There's nothing to gain from imposing penalties on the power companies.

__________________
"I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your request." - Capt. Barbossa

tinfoil

The company I work for could easily have lost 100k in sales as a result of the blackouts, something insurance will not cover. Our customers have lost millions in lost productivity.

However, such as myself, individuals have lost little, if at all. If anyone is to sue FirstEnergy, let it be businesses. I am sorry folks, but being without TV or your AC for a day or so isn't worth tying up the courts for. Millions of dollars of lost productivity is, perhaps.

__________________
Get off your fuckin cross. We need the fuckin space to nail the next fool martyr.

rockogre

I can agree with this somewhat. Expecting anything to work 100% of the time is unreasonable. The gov or the insurance should cover this type of thing.

__________________
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

KeyserSoze

Look....something broke, stopped working, and many people were without power..thats all.......NO POWER!!

Many companies lost revenue because of this blackout, and many people could not watch their soaps, Jerry Springer and reruns of Seinfield, and most of those people watched in HORROR as their favorite ice cream melted in the freezer or their Pepsi got cold.

When there is a Hurricane, Earthquake, Tornado, Flood, or Fire and we lose power, water, phones, gas, and our toilets we accept these things and DEAL WITH THEM...but....the only thing different now is the SCUMFUKASSWIPELEACHING LAWYERS actually have someone to sue and most companies and the govt. have someone to point a finger at and say it's your fault and your to blame.

If any of you for ONE MINUTE don't think the power company executives are smiling from ear to ear right now ......WAKE UP!!

They have the media eating right the fuck out of their hands..."we need to upgrade" "It's going to cost Billions to fix this so it never happens again" "our systems are outdated" and don't think for a second they will actually do a damn thing EXCEPT RAISE your bills and pocket some SERIOUS CASH....same as the lawyers.

Our forefathers have got to be laughing their ASSES OFF. I think this was a good thing because some people might have actually spoke to their neighbor, or god forbid had a real conversation amongst their own family for once during the blackout.

So if your company lost some revenue, you lost some groceries, or missed a day of work and you're mad, remember some people have no job, no groceries, no power, and no place to live

So be thankful and get pissed at all the scumbags that are going to make an extra few bucks off of this.

Bottom line..........someones getting rich off this and it won't be any of us.........NOT BY A LONG SHOT!

__________________
THERE IS NO KEYSER SOZE!!

kel

Many people including private citizens lost thousands of dollars, and experienced inconveniences you may not be relating to.

Take for instance the family that wasn't able to place the deposit for a loan on their new house thanks to the blackout.

Their credit history took a hit, they lost existing deposits, failed to close on the house, and are sitting at home RIGHT now with NO power and water... the name of the family escapes me, they live on the block where I used to have an apartment...

All this because engineers failed to perform their jobs because... I would imagine... they are badly trained and not motivated. Why? Becuase they really don't give a fark about the people they serve... it's all a means to make money to them... The whole attitude of people today... when you take on a job you take on a responsibility to the people you are supposed to serve... just because you can get away with it doesn't mean you should...

__________________
"It better be funny"

tinfoil

And one call to the bank should have that taken care of. Or atleast it would up here.

__________________
Get off your fuckin cross. We need the fuckin space to nail the next fool martyr.

skysooner

This is the most ridiculous thing I can think of. The majority of people in this country have absolutely no idea how the power grid functions. Sure, this outage had an effect on people (and insurance will cover a bunch of it). I happen to live in an area that gets power disruptions all the time due to storms, tornados, etc. All we do is light up candles, keep the refrigerator doors closed and know that we are going to get power back eventually (usually within 12 hours). I also happen to be an expert on electric power distribution, electric rate schedules and power deregulation. The utilities aren't nearly as wealthy as you might think. Anything they spend that is not covered by the current rates you pay has to be covered through rate increases. These increases have to be supported by proper documentation and approved by the government regulatory agencies. What caused this failure was nothing as simple as one line coming down due to a tree limb. Think about electricity for a moment. Electricity is not a storable commodity. There has to be enough electric generation available to cover all people's usage at any one time. This usage generally peaks in the late afternoon or early evening in the late summer days when air conditioning usage is at its highest. The utilities do not keep power generation up all year since factories cost money and most of the time their most efficient plants supply the power. When usage peaks as mentioned above, they bring more and more plants on-line. These plants are not the most efficient plants they have since to operate them all year would cost the consumer and them more money. This is the way that utility rates are kept down. This is also the reason that electric rates are not uniform throughout the country. Parts of the country that have lower cost power (i.e. hydroelectric) pay a much lower cost than those areas that have nuclear power. This is part of what electric deregulation is supposed to accomplish. They were hoping to level power costs throughout the country, but some of the same issues with power transmission and distribution came up, and it doesn't look like it will happen anytime soon.

Enough about that. That firm is just going for the jugular when it is politically expedient to do so hoping to get an easy settlement. Look at the history of silicon breast implants to see what these kinds of firms will do.

Apokx

100,000 in damages from a power outtage?
Surely he didn't lose that much in food..

james t kirk

EXACTLY

These clowns will sue alright, probably get a big bag of money after 7 or 8 years too.

By then, if Wile E's cousin still even remembers, he might get a cheque for $9.43 provided he signs some documents that he accepts his $9.43 as full compensation for his $100,000 loss.

Meanwhile the shysters will keep everything "to cover our costs".

No doubt that these utility guys are negligent, but class action is never the way to go.

If you are that pissed off, hire your own lawyer and sue them yourself.

Wile E

DAMAGES and lost goods. In certain areas near me the power spiked before it went out. Reaching voltages of over 300v per leg. Thusly blowing out everything that had any electronics. Computer systems, touch screen service stations, flat screen tvs, phone system, camera system, lighting control system, walk in boxes, refrigerators, etc. I could go on, but I'm not. Realistic totals were around 60,000 in damages. But couple that with the loses of their three best nights, and its a nice chunk of change.

__________________
"We got no food, no clothes...our pets HEADS ARE FALLIN' OFF!"

JBX

Another money grab by lawyers. The bigger picture is not important to them. Just their next luxury car.

__________________
"Youth and Strength is no match for Age and Treachery"

etla

Geez, these businesses should either put up or shut up. If your business is going to loose a $100,000 a day just because the power went out don't think you should be looking at backup power solutions? I live some place where -45 isn't unusual and I've invested in a small generator to power my furnace should the lights go out. A few kilowatts is less than a grand even in weak ass canadian money.

etla

Now that's something worth sueing for. But you probably don't have to. Just document it and the power company will pony up. I used regularily replace compressors in refrigerators for customers out at the end of crappy line because of over and under voltages. It was cheaper for Hydro to pay the bills then it was to fix the lines. Plus NIMBY always came into play. Everyone wants power no one wants power lines.

elfuq

Not that the Bush White House lobbied against and eventually defeated a bill for electricity infrastructure investment in 2001 or anything?

Macheath

Sue. If the Congress doesn't give a shit and most of society doesn't give a shit - go for it, it's the best chance you've got to keep your head above water, especially if you own a small business. Big companies aren't made to feel 'guilty' for retaining lawyers, why should you? The concept of negligence isn't that hard to figure out.