Duke Power, you owe this community an apology. The sappy public relations radio ad with the elevator music and the praise for the heroic efforts of the linemen who restored our power will not suffice. If they wanted to keep their jobs, those linemen had no choice but to come here from all over the country to fix the mess Duke Power made. I’m sure the haggard men who finally came to turn on the lights on my street, men who told me their crew hadn’t stopped working in 18 hours, would rather be at home with their families than slaving away in the dark, cold hell hole Duke Power turned this community into for a week and a half. Murmurs from the lips of Duke’s public relations people to the tune of “We understand,” “We sympathize,” and “We realize,” just don’t cut it. Of course, I understand that using the word “sorry” in a public setting implies some wrongdoing on the part of Duke Power and could further negatively impact the company’s stock price and give potential investors the jitters. But that doesn’t change the fact that Duke Power owes all two million of us an apology.
Please realize that I’m not talking about a quick “so sorry” from the lips of one of your PR flacks. No, I’m talking about a full-court press conference in which Duke Power executives formally apologize to this community. It need not be an out-and-out acknowledgement of guilt, just some sign that those that run the company have some conception of the vast personal and financial havoc their neglect has wreaked upon our lives.
A pinstriped blue ribbon committee isn’t needed to determine what caused this fiasco. All you have to do is drive around town and take a look at Duke’s power lines to see what caused the bulk of the power outage. All over the county, you’ll see thick tree limbs eight-to-20 feet long jutting over power lines (see photos page 14). Often these limbs don’t just jut over the lines, they grow through them. Do you realize how many years of neglect by Duke Power it took for those limbs to grow to that size?
The absurd tantrum Duke execs threw last week, when they claimed overhanging limbs haven’t been cut because people don’t want the company to butcher trees, hardly explains this situation. Let’s take the jutting limbs on Hawthorne Lane for instance. The large oak limbs right over the lines near Seventh Street could easily be removed without making a noticeable difference in the appearance of the tree. So could those on Seventh Street across from Jack’s. Similar cases abound all over the city. It’s often a case of removing a few particularly troublesome branches jutting right over the power lines. Butchering small-limbed trees, virtually cutting their canopies in half, as Duke has done on some parts of Fairview Road, is unnecessary. And that doesn’t even address those lines that run behind homes, businesses and other inconspicuous places, many of which literally disappear into a jungle of vegetation.
The truth is that Duke doesn’t care to spend the money it would take to properly maintain these lines and everyone in this community knows it. As Duke spokesperson Tom Shiel explained to me last week, the company’s $40 million budget pays for the maintenance of 7,000 miles of power lines a year. The company has 52,000 miles of lines. At that rate, individual lines are maintained every seven years. What a joke. I suppose the company figures that if it just waits long enough, those limbs will come down the next time we have a freeze or a hurricane and they won’t have to pay to cut them down. If you think about it, this strategy makes sense financially. If it costs $40 million to maintain just over a seventh of its lines every year, it would cost the company $148 million to maintain half of them each year. Compared to that cost over time, it’s probably cheaper to fix a blackout after the fact than maintain the lines upfront. And of course this way, you have the option of charging customers for the cleanup.
But like so many others in this community, I can’t worry about that right now because I’m trying to put my life back together. After eight days without power, my Christmas money is gone, spent on heaters, eating out and other basics for survival. The beautiful tropical fish I’ve been nurturing for years are dead. My cat, who is HIV-positive and was doing great, has weakened and is sick. I’m chapped in places on my body that I didn’t know could chap, I’m sleep-deprived and my flu is back. That might not matter to Duke Power, but it matters to me. All I want is an acknowledgement of what I and others went through. All I want is an apology.
This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2002.
