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Danny |
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Just a second. Let me find a match for this candle. Okay. Take out your Sixth-Grade Science Book and open it to the section on “Transportation and Communication: Electricity”. Skip over the Ben Franklin stuff and the Thomas Edison stuff, and go directly to the part about “How Power Distribution Is Designed To Work.” Now, using a sharp scissor or razor blade, slice this stupid section out of your book. It’s all wrong. Careful. Don’t cut yourself in the dark. Although no one has said yet what started the “Blackout Of 2003” officially, anyway- -and it will be weeks before there is a definitive answer- -numerous early shutdowns occurred in New York’s Niagara Mohawk power grid and cascaded through several states and parts of Canada. We also know that there was a problem near Dayton, Ohio. Wilbur and Orville weren’t home. But Cleveland, Akron, Toledo and many cities from Erie to Altoona went dark. Say, do you want that sandwich with melted cheese or just plain? Okay. Altoona. Now take out your companion workbook and turn to the map of “The Northeast”. First, color in Canada with a pink crayon. Canada and all British Commonwealth-affiliated countries are always pink, whether they’re still part of Ye Olde Empire or separated. Now, with any of several other crayons, color in the states of Pennsylvania (usually light green as it is “Penn’s Woods”), Ohio, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont (also green, but a different shade, as it is “Green Mountain”) and you can color in Maryland and Delaware or New Hampshire and Maine if you care to, although they don’t really matter. Make sure you use your blue crayon for coloring in Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Label them. Do you know which is which without looking? Now, with a glow-in-the-dark marker, make a dot where all 22 of the nuclear power plants are. Never mind the other 80 or so “regular” ones which shut down. Terrorists will mostly want to know where the nuclear plants are and you should know too. Are you lucky enough to have one near where you live? Next we will look at how electricity is made. Mostly it occurs naturally in nature in the form of lightning, as proven by Ben Franklin, or not, depending on which of his latest biographies you read. It doesn’t really matter. He had a good publicist- -himself- -so there’s not really much sense in arguing the point. At any rate- -ha!! electric rate!!- - Doctor Franklin’s experiments were key- -oh I am sorry. Yes, I should go fly a kite. For years, science was carried on by people like Voltaire- -for whom we have named the Volt- -and who famously said “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”- -and James Watt- -who perfected the steam engine but nevertheless has gotten his name on every light bulb made in the whole world- -and who said “They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers”- - Whoops!! Wrong James Watt- -that last quote is from James G Watt who was Ronald Reagan’s amazingly unpopular Interior Secretary. Others, too, contributed, such as Georg Simon Ohm- -that’s right- -no “e” at the end of Georg- -they couldn’t afford it in his day- -and whose law- -“Ohm is where the heart is”- -has been the law since 1827. And let’s also not forget André-Marie Ampère- -for whom we have named the Amp- -although mine are named for Leo Fender. Ampère never went to school but still, in 1826, ended up teaching science at the Collège de France. The French. Go figure. It was probably because of his electromagnetic personality. Anyway, we are all familiar with the Volt, the Watt, the Amp, and Ohm’s Law, which of course really is I over E equals AC: Incredible heat over Electricity equals Air Conditioning. But unfortunately most of the people who run such things as, oh, the North American Electric Reliability Council, or, say, The Congress of the United States, have little knowledge of these things, having seemingly emulated Ampère and also not gone to school at least as far as sixth-grade science. Just since the blackout, our fearless leader, who spent the day and night of August 14th and 15th in that hard-hit community of San Diego, California, raising a million dollars for his reëlection campaign, said- -well he said several things. My favorite is actually about the California recall in which he said that he “followed politics”, making me wonder, shouldn’t he actually “lead” rather than “follow”? But I digress. What he said about The Blackout was, and let’s quote the Associated Press account: “I view it as a wake-up call. You know, I’ve been concerned that our infrastructure, the delivery system is old and antiquated. I think this is an indication of the fact that we need to modernize the electricity grid.” Oh? Realwee? The United States has three main electricity grids- -The East, The West, and Texas. Now why would Texas have its own? I wonder. Guess where the energy bandits who put California on the ropes two years ago live? And guess where the guys who oversee much of what the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission does come from? Hmmm…I wonder. Could it be? Could it be that energy as a profitable commodity is over-riding the public welfare? Naw, good Americans wouldn’t conceive of doing a thing like that, would they? It will be weeks, months even, before all this is sorted through, and finger-pointing and name-calling subside. Hey, Jean Chrétien!! How about a beaver at Niagara Falls? Now let’s return to our textbooks and prepare to read tomorrow’s chapter: “How Grids Avoid Overload” and the follow-up “What Can Go Wrong”. Start with the paragraph “When demand throughout the system gets too high, entire plants shut down”. Discuss. By the way, Tom Ridge will get back to us soon about what color this makes everything. I’d continue to explain this more, but I haven’t got the energy.
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