Blackouts dim fairylights in Tinseltown

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Dispatch from San Francisco

Blackouts dim fairylights in Tinseltown

As most Californians brace themselves for more power cuts, some appear not to be pulling their weight at all. Duncan Campbell reports

Duncan Campbell in San Francisco Wednesday January 24, 2001

"On sunny days, open drapes on windows facing south and let the sun shine in. At night, close the drapes to retain indoor heat." So runs the advice being issued to Californians in the wake of the energy crisis which has led to "rolling blackouts" - the new phrase of the moment that has replaced "pregnant chads" in the news media's vocabulary. Put rather more simply, the advice is - draw your curtains in the morning and draw them shut at night. The advice comes from Pacific Gas and Electric, one of the utility companies whose threatened bankruptcy in the wake of a failed deregulation experiment has helped to prompt the current crisis. After the first power failures last week, more are promised and so far it seems that the light at the end of the tunnel may only be a guttering candle.

So perhaps it is appropriate that the trailer for the new film about Pearl Harbour should be reminding audiences all over the state of the importance of the old wartime spirit. The lights are going out all over California and what needs to be engendered is, if not a bulldog spirit, at least a sort of beagle spirit which will help people tackle the hardships that await.

One major hardship that will have to be addressed is hinted it in the second piece of advice given so generously by PG & E: "wash only full loads in a dishwasher. If operating instructions allow, turn dishwasher off before the drying cycle and let dishes dry naturally." One way not to use so much power would, of course, be to wash the dishes by hand but clearly we have not quite reached such dire straits yet.

While all these blackouts are taken quite seriously in the Bay Area, the only signs that people in Los Angeles were heeding the warnings seemed to be that some of the fairylights that drape the palm trees in different parts of the city may have to be dimmed.

In northern California, they fume at this sort of extravagance. They recall that during the last water shortage, while northern Californians were conserving water in the best way they knew - "if it's yellow, that's mellow; if it's brown, flush it down" - the same could not be said of the southlands. There was outrage that in Bel Air in LA municipal workers had a high speed water jet using about 80 gallons to the second to get bubble gum off the sidewalks.

But there is a political dimension to all this. Even an impartial observer would have admitted that George Bush (house style now means that the W has gone to the alphabet in the sky) was smirking when the issue came up last week: he suggested that maybe all those environmental restrictions on the production of power might have to be relaxed. And Governor Gray Davis, whose political future as a possible presidential candidate may hang on this, knows that he needs to fix it and soon.

In the meantime, the best advice is the oldest: just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street.

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,427398,00.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 24, 2001


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