Depending on others could be a bad idea
over-our-heads
You may be aware of the rolling blackouts across Texas and New Mexico, but you may not be aware of all the problems home owners were faced with, and the repairs they’ll have to make.
http://kutnews.org/post/texas-power-outages-caused-7000-megawatts-going-offline
Many of us believe it all starts with the new mentality that if it hasn’t happened in the last 20 years, then there’s no requirement to prepare for it. Fact is, many Americans and Corporations appear to think the FEDs are responsible to help repair the mess and property damage created by the lack of preparedness of individuals and corporations!
Imagine, some cooler air comes into Texas and New Mexico and they experience temperatures about 15F on average cooler than normal, and this keeps generating capacity off line, and unable to cover the cooler dip! It just wasn’t that long ago, that our Fathers and Grand-Fathers were prepared, they knew that anything that had happened in the last 200 years or more years could happen again, and they also knew that there wasn’t going to be anyone there to save their dumb asses, so they were prepared for anything. This is a perfect example of how things really are, 99 percent of the population were certain the Power Companies were responsible enough to have their equipment winterized, and ready for a cold spell. Fact is, they weren’t, but it’s far worse than that, reports I got from some folks in New Mexico is they lost Natural Gas to many homes and commercial buildings and since a lot of people were seeing temps well below zero F, it took very little time for water pipes to freeze and a lot of damage to occur. Some reports indicate that the natural gas pumping stations were totally dependent on the power grid, and the natural gas suppliers have no standby generators or engine powered back up pumps to keep the gas flowing when there is a grid outage! If there is a lesson to be learned here, it will be forgotten in a year or two by 99% of the population. Hopefully DIYers will remember the lesson.
We live in a new age when society has made every excuse for failure, there are few expectations of individuals or even corporations to manage their own affairs and assure they can take care of their responsibilities as we might see them. Fact is there are often penalities for Corporations who choose to be more responsible. An example might be a big fat pension plan. The Plan Manager might realize that the economy could dip, and earnings might take a huge tumble (like right now), but if the Corporation holds too much in the pension fund, Raiders could seize a portion of the pension assets to fund their takeover! Thank your Government for this. Pension funds can fail because your Government won’t let a pension fund run flush enough to get through hard times. You also know that FDIC insured means ‘you the taxpayer’ picks up the tab, govenment does not make money, they consume it.
We all know.. if we want to make the situation even worse, give it to the Government! In closing I think I have a great idea, have you been to the hardware store lately? have you noticed that even a small steel washer is 3 cents or more? Why is the federal government still making pennies! Let’s lobby to give up the Penny and adopt a steel flat washer as our smallest coin, they’re worth three or more times what a Penny is, they’re likely cheaper to make and we can always find a use for them!
George B.
I’ve been saying it for years now; The Great American Addiction; Electricity, and the
overwhelming idea that somebody else will be there to dig you out of the mess your
in. Never preparing for the inevitable, ”What if”.
Being here in W Texas, I do have to say it got cold enough to freeze the water in the toilet tank and bust it along with a lot of plastic piping. The stool part is working fine, if you pour water into stool. I grew up in Northern Wis and never saw a toilet tank freeze solid, of course better insulation due to the fact of getting cold weather every year probably accounts for it not happening. The shop I work in doesn’t have insulation, you can see daylight through the vertical concrete block joints where they didn’t use any mortar, we had a coffee pot full of water crack from cold. But we got by, with plug in electrical heater in office, the few days we were open. Town did get water shut off as the pump stopped working, luckily I got my load of laundry done just before the laundromat shut down, never lost electrical. The town east of us with the hardware store had to call the police because customers got a little unruly fighting over repair parts to fix water lines. We managed to get by, one of the reasons I like small town living versus big city living, just do what you have to do to get by versus city folks running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
Charles, happy to see a post from Texas.. sounds like a lot of folks didn’t heed the cold warning. The power plant should have been ready. Glad you’re getting by.
Hi George
Nice picture, thats a lot of global warming hes digging out there. Must of expelled a load of carbon digging that lot out. I hope he is paying carbon tax on all the air he has used.
You might laugh but just give it a few years.
The Met and the IPCC are constant sources of amusement for all of us…. not to mention our own EPA 🙂 Here’s a site run by an Ozzie Girl I especially like..
http://joannenova.com.au/
Blaming the government for all the problems is juat as mentally lazy as expecting it to fix everything.
And who’s blaming the government or expecting them to fix it? This post (a heads up from Texas) is all about power producers, and why >we< should be self sufficient.. It's about why we don't depend on the government and why we shouldn't expect them to fix it. Did you take a mental vacation while reading it? DIYers don't expect much of the government..