Boom, Boom, Out Go the Lights
If this is Tuesday, this must be Belgium (from the movie with the same name) but, if this is Thursday, it must be time for another power outage. That’s right, yet another power outage, here at the stately Motley Manor, just like the last three, consecutive Thursdays, courtesy of our dear friends (not) at Southern California Edison.
Just kidding, I know they’re just trying to make our mountain safer, but for Pete’s sake (and who the heck is this guy Pete?), why don’t the just bury their line underground?
This is getting old. I mean, I’m really getting tired of lookin’ for my baby every dang time the lights go out… Excuse me for cussin’, you know, dang. What I really meant to say was the dreaded “D” word… here it comes…Dagnabbit!!! I’m sorry, baby, please don’t make me wash my mouth with soap!
“No kiddin’, I’m ready to fight. I’ve been lookin’ for my baby all night. If I get her in my sight, boom, boom, out go the lights.” (“Boom, Boom, Out Go The Lights” – Pat Travers – 1976)
Here’s an ironic fact… The day after Pat Travers played at the National Orange Show Event Center (then the Swing Auditorium – where the Rolling Stones previously played in1965), a twin Cessna crashed into it… Boom, boom, out go the lights.
But I digress. Last winter, when the lights went out during one of SCE’s planned outages, it was like Little House on the Prairie, around here, what with me and my baby having to use flashlights to see where we were going. Not to mention not being able to heat the house and having to light the burner on the stove to cook some soup or canned veggies because we couldn’t light the dang oven, not that it mattered, since most of the food in the fridge was rotting from lack of power. “Dagnabbit!” Oh no, baby, not the soap again!
Let me shed some light on this (sorry, no pun intended…OK, so it was intended). Edison needs to get their act together and bury their cotton-pickin’ powerlines underground, just as they’re required to do in hundreds of communities throughout Southern California. If the lines were buried, it would be impossible for trees and limbs to fall on them and start another wildfire.
Oh, sure, Edison says it will cost too much to bury the powerlines and, if they bury them on the side of the road, it will kill all the trees they haven’t killed already. Well, how about burying them under the street, like the water company does…duh!
How much do you think it cost them when one of their fallen powerlines ignited a firestorm, destroying 200 homes in Grass Valley, or what it cost PG&E when Paradise burned to the ground, and now the Dixie Fire up north? A dang bundle. No biggie for them, since they will be able to recoup their losses by foisting yet another rate increase upon their customers.
“Boom, boom, out go the lights.”
Keep it flyin’, Uncle Mott