Curmudgeon alert: Power lines and salt

Consider today's post in the nature of a blowing-off-steam item, a getting-it-off-one's-chest sort of thing. I thought if I waited a few days it would just go away; alas, it didn't.

The main target of today's rant is the imbecility, the total lack of imagination, of the so-called 5th estate, particularly of the local variety. I know well that anecdotes ain't data. But they ain't nothing either, so here are two of them, introduced by a brief prolegomenon.

Now, during the recent Snowmegeddon here in the Washington area, a term coined, I am led to believe, by the President himself (more of him in a moment), the local news types have had a lot of air time to fill and not a lot to fill it with, since it sort of follows that when the weather derails normal business and professional activities, there are not a lot of those activities to talk about. So they filled it with stories about the weather, and their favorite sub-species of those stories: stories about the press getting stories about the weather.

Well, what the heck, why not?: Everyone loves stories about the weather, the network types know, because the viewer is in a sense part of the story, or implicitly assumes himself to be. Nothing wrong with manipulating superficial mass narcissism for fun and profit, right?

It's a matter of taste, I suppose. But, as I have said, two little episodes reveal how irritating this can be.

In episode one, a local anchor was interviewing the head of PEPCO, the local electrical utility. A lot of people lost power during the storms, as always happens when there are even halfway serious storms around here, and just about everywhere else in the United States, too. So this senior local anchor has the Big Guy on a phone interview, and the interview goes on for a long time by network TV standards--something on the order to seven to ten minutes. And it never occurs to the anchor to ask the Big Guy why all these damned power lines are still strung up in the air after all these years. If they had been buried, as they are in most civilized countries, this wouldn't happen to us every damned time the wind fixes to blow hard.

Now, I know, this is a complicated subject. It costs more up-front to bury the lines, and burying the lines does not obviate all maintenance and system costs. And I know, too, that we're often talking great distances here, and that helps to explain why we still so often stick our lines up in the air while the countries of Western Europe, for example, do not.

Helps to explain, but in fact does not wholly explain. It is also explained by derangements of federalism, our inability to plan as we once did, the venality of developers and corruption of local government, and more besides. All that said, if President Obama is looking for a major project that could create decent jobs, and that would do a world of good economically, aesthetically and even in terms of national security, he would vow to have all of our power and communications networks underground by the end of the decade. (Better still, we could use innovation to decentralize our power and communications grids to a considerable extent, saving even more money and grief, but that's probably two generations away.)

I know, as I say, that this is a complicated technical issue. We have lots of legacy infrastructure to deal with, and doing that is both expensive and generates turf spats among government jurisdictions, utilities and businesses. But we don't even know the actual numbers here of what a national project to modernize our systems would cost in the shorter run and save in the longer run. Repairing miles and miles of downed wires is expensive; it is part of the whole-system costs of the way we do things, but these costs are rarely if ever figured into our assessments. Lots of engineers have used models to make estimates of costs to do fractions of the job, but no one, as far as I know, has ever systematically worked up a plan to examine scaled-up costs and financing.

Of course, if we had in this country a Department of Infrastructure, or something like it, where we did anything like serious planning about our transportation and communication systems, maybe someone would have thought to do this. No one has, because we have no such capacity. We have a Department of Transportation, but long-term planning seems not to be among its duties. We have the FCC, but ditto as far as I can tell. And as far as I can tell, there is no place in the U.S. government that relates the disparate parts of this infrastructure to a whole.

It's way past time we do this. Until we do, I am not inclined to be the slightest bit sympathetic when wails of complaint rise after major storms, and so many people lose power--which is not just an inconvenience for many people, but a life-and-death ordeal when elderly or ill people lose heat and the ability to communicate for days on end. This is our own damned fault. Stupidity, laziness and corruption (yes, unfortunately, that's part of the problem, too) have their wages. We're still paying them.

Second episode, from the selfsame day: a weather anchor fretting about the possibility that we might run out of salt for the roads. The news showed a huge truck being loaded at the port of Baltimore with salt imported from Chile and Mexico. And so I learned that we buy this product from abroad; an interesting fact in its own right, seeing as how the state of Utah is full of the stuff. But the weather anchor never asked the simple question: What happens to all this salt when the snow and ice melts and the spring rains come? What does it do to the soil and the water, and all the life that depends on both? Never asked; never raised.

We used to use sand and ash to treat the roads, much less pressure on the environment; how come we don't do this anymore? Maybe there's a good answer, but I don't know what it is, since not one of our genius local TV journalists has seemed ever to ask. I am not asking for anything so exalted as "investigative journalism", which seems to have pretty much disappeared. I'm just hoping for a scintilla of ordinary curiosity, fortified with just a smidgen of imagination. It'll never happen, I know. Pfrzghtwskzczxuuumph......