Small government in action

It’s been a week since Hurricane Irene struck the East Coast, and many people are still without power. In fact, many people’s houses are still under water. President Obama has declared a state of emergency, but the government doesn’t seem to be doing much. Why? Because government is too small.

The federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina was utterly ham-fisted, but at least they were in charge then. In my home state of Connecticut, the governor stepped aside while the local utilities companies dictated the pace of power restoration. The result: they did absolutely nothing on the first day after the storm, and have been dragging their feet ever since.

Connecticut Light and Power boasted that 800 crews were working but, as it turns out, they weren’t working as hard as they could. According to the Danbury News-Times, CL&P has been cutting the number of linemen and the number of hours they are allowed to work, which saves the company money but means that a lot of people have to sit in the dark for a long time.

The government can be inefficient but, as the residents of Connecticut have found out, private interests can be just as inefficient. Paying your electric bill is not enough to keep the utility company from dragging its feet when your power goes out. Hurricane Irene showed that private interests could not handle a job that was well within their normal area of responsibility; restoring power is not going “above and beyond” for the power company. They had their chance to take the lead and prove they could respond faster than the government. They failed.

Trapped in New Jersey

I’m trapped in New Jersey. Thanks to Hurricane Irene, my house is without power, so I took the trip down to ‘Jersey to move my brother into his dorm as an opportunity to escape. Now, thanks to additional hurricane damage on I-287 North, I’m stuck. The frustrating thing is, I never should have had to leave in the first place.

Irene attacked the Northeast with 60 mph winds and nearly eight inches of rainfall, but my town didn’t get any of that. No one’s house blew away, no one’s street was flooded. There were a few downed trees (which took the power lines with them), but that happens all the time.

This rural part of the country is prone to freak thunderstorms and, with so many trees near power lines, it is not uncommon for the lines to come down. Usually the local utilities company, Connecticut Light and Power, is caught off guard, but this time they had almost a week to prepare.

Instead, they spent all of Sunday bellyaching about how it was too windy to send their crews out when, in fact, the sun was out in parts of the state. They politely explained their policy of focusing on “high priority” outages first, but if those “high priorities” were so dangerous to work on, why didn’t they go work where it was not dangerous?

This isn’t just one spoiled brat’s rant about not being able to flush the toilet. When I left yesterday, there trees blocking several of the main roads, including one that was suspended in midair by power lines. That seems like a safety risk to everyone, but we just have to deal with it because we don’t live in a metropolitan area; restoring power to a few country bumpkins won’t be much of a PR coup for CL&P.

Irene was a catastrophe for some, but not for everyone. Instead of focusing on the drama, the men and women with the boom trucks should focus on fixing this mess.