Anger festers in sweltering mid-Atlantic

[phantom power]

CBS News) WASHINGTON - From the Midwest to the mid-Atlantic, some 1.4 million homes and businesses are still in the dark, and the heat, four days after violent storms caused heavy damage.

Many are now asking their local utilities why it's taking so long to get the lights back on.

Power companies say they've been playing catch-up as they struggle to get the Washington, D.C., area back online following Friday's big storm, which hit so quickly it caught just about everyone by surprise.

....

The vast area affected by what officials are calling a catastrophic event has made it impossible to get the kind of assistance the Washington area usually counts on.

"The resources we'd usually get from Ohio or other places, they needed their contractors to restore service for their own customers," notes Pepco Region President Thomas Graham.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57465518/anger-festers-in-sweltering-mid-atlantic/

[Windy]

1. That's what you get when you privatize services.... nt

[Ezlivin]

2. The Free Market will solve all problems

Except when it's not profitable.

That's the one point they always neglect to mention.

PS: Like your Beryl Markham avatar!

[LiberalEsto]

4. Deregulation

The utilities, particulary PEPCO, got rid of the majority of their repair workers after Maryland passed deregulation.
Now they rely on "reciprocal agreements" with other utilities to provide the necessary manpower.

PEPCO opted to focus on short-term profits and executive bonuses, instead of customer service.

If people complain, PEPCO responds by massacring trees, claiming that overgrown foliage is the problem.

[msongs]

5. they had hours of advance notice, apparently they chose not to pay attention nt

[FirstLight]

6. When i see this kind of ineptitude

I shudder to think what a real high level emergency or storm could do to our society ... so many take these kinds of things for granted...electricity, water, sewer, trash... all those little things that make the 'civilized' world work are so easily busted by Mother Nature... and she is quite pissed with us at the moment.

[kristopher]

7. New climate word of the day: DERECHO

I'm no fan of utilities, and deregulation has certainly led to gaps in services like line mx, but this isn't their fault as responders to a disaster, it is their fault as emitters of carbon.

I live in the country and my dogs started acting like there was someone outside the house that night, so I went outside to look around just after midnight. Things were very quiet, but before I was more than 50 yards from the house I started hearing a roaring noise from the west. The wind started gusting and there was a very real feeling of something being wrong. I literally sprinted to the house and got inside just about 2 minutes before the winds hit.

I'm old enough to have seen a lot of weather and have even watched hurricanes roll in off the Gulf of Mexico; but I've never seen anything like that storm. The wind that moved through was like a solid wall and once it passed (about 15 minutes) the lightening like I've never seen before lingered for another 2 hours.

A 'Land Hurricane' Strikes States From Midwest To East; New Storms Predicted
June 30, 2012 by KORVA COLEMAN

A powerful series of storms blew through several eastern states late Friday and early Saturday morning, killing at least nine people and throwing at least 3 million people into the dark.

This unusually damaging system is called a derecho, notes AccuWeather (it's pronounced deh-RAY-cho). According to the National Weather Service, a derecho is a gigantic wind storm coupled with thunderstorms. These are as powerful as tornadoes, but they don't twist; they drive in a straight line. They're described as land hurricanes because they have wind gusts of at least 58 miles per hour and higher.

Meteorologists with the Washington Post say derechos get their power from hot, humid weather. That's exactly what was going on when the storms blossomed above regions setting heat records or getting awfully close to them.

It all started late Friday morning outside Chicago as a cluster of thunderstorms, says the Weather Channel. The bad weather plowed south and east, hitting Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia and New Jersey...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/06/30/156047359/a-land-hurricane-strikes-states-from-midwest-to-east-new-storms-predicted

[phantom power]

8. that reminds me of this:

No wind shear or tornadic activity but still a huge imbalance.

The extraordinary heat and moisture caused high levels of atmospheric instability rarely seen. For those of you familiar with atmospheric stability indicies, the Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE) in Eastern North Carolina and South Carolina at 2 pm EDT Sunday was 5000 - 6000, with a lifted index of -14.

The Morehead City NWS office analyzed CAPE levels in excess of 7000 in the region, which is a truly rare occurrence. Fortunately, there was very little wind shear Sunday, so the upper-level winds were not able to induce the kind of twisting force needed to generate tornadoes.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2142

[Nihil]

9. From the heading and your first line, I thought it was going to be quite different ...

> New climate word of the day: DERECHO
> I'm no fan of utilities, and deregulation has certainly led to gaps in services ...

I thought "derecho" was going to be a portmanteau word from deregulation-echo
(i.e., penalties inherent in privatisation) rather than a genuine meteorological term.

Glad you kept safe - the descriptions of that storm have made horrendous reading
even from the safety of a different continent ...