Power Floutage

Things are going great in New Orleans a year later:

“I had to go somewhere else to sleep,” said Nicole Guinchard, a waitress who works a 60-hour week on two jobs. “It was a hotbox in here,” she said outside her house on Dauphine Street.

“The deal was, at first, it was every time it rained. Lately, it’s been for no reason at all,” said Linda Morreale, an owner of a neighborhood tavern, Bud Rip’s. Ms. Morreale has seen her customers slowly drift away: “Everybody sits around until they get kind of uncomfortable.”

There is sudden darkness, then the creeping invasion of the humidity outside.

Mr. Stephens, the contractor, detailed the stages: “You get hot. Your kids get irritable. They drive you crazy. It’s a whole big ordeal.” Not to mention, he said, the extra $400 he has had to spend to replace groceries lost to the failures.

“Every couple of days, the lights be going off,” said Samuel Breaux, a warehouseman in a neighborhood sewing factory. The big building goes dark, and the women stop sewing. “You can’t do too much of nothing when the power’s out.”

Entergy executives say the problem is a complicated mix of uncertainty over how many people to serve, power lines that remain down, and connections that are no longer as reliable. Before the storm, when the electricity blinked out for a moment — as it did even in normal times, during New Orleans’s frequent summer storms — the utility could immediately switch to alternate lines. That option is far less available now.

“We don’t have the same number of power lines,” said Rod West, an Entergy manager. Most of the 22 substations were flooded; Entergy estimates it will need $267 million just to fix the remaining damage.

$267 Million. We spend that much in Iraq before the sun gets overhead. We're busting our humps to get precision munitions to Isreal so they can kill more civilians, but power in New Orleans? Not so much. Maybe Louisiana should just elect Jeb Bush governor - that'd get shit fixed.

Nice to see where this government's priorities are - Entergy's bailout was denied by the Bush Administration - and what's going to happen this year?

When the hell is this country going to stand up and say "We've had enough!"