Our Town: Power to the people?

RICHARD ALLIN ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

OUR LATEST gas bill was twice the amount of the previous bill. It was 10 times the amount of the bill before that. What's happening to Arkansas?

Thanks to the fragile infrastructure maintained by Entergy and other state electrical distribution systems, we were also among the thousands plunged into cold darkness on Christmas night in the aftermath of a crushing ice storm.

We were not so lucky as some, but luckier than others. Our electric power remained off until the following Saturday, at 5:04 a.m. We lived in temperatures 40 degrees or below. An electric power pole collapsed in our back yard during the first outage. A few days later, several days before Christmas, Entergy showed up and deposited a replacement power pole in our front yard, and left it there. It is still there, lying on our grass, parallel to the gutter.

Then Asplundh arrived to butcher the oak trees in our back yard, far beyond what was necessary, in my humble opinion. The Asplundh crew then piled two gigantic piles of logs and dismembered limbs onto the grass of our front yard and drove off. One of the piles remains. City crews carted off one of the piles, using a gigantic front-end loader with biting capabilities. They deposited the debris into the open trailer of a large 18-wheeler. They did not remove the second pile, for reasons of logic understood only by the city department. Asplundh had piled it seven or eight feet onto our lawn. They had piled it around a small sugar maple tree that I had driven to Little Rock from where I bought it in Little Compton, R.I. It is important to us. I had to dig it out from Asplundh's pile, marking it as I did so with white strips of cloth. The city crew that removed the first pile was a cheerful and courteous bunch. I liked all that I met. They explained to me they were leaving the job uncompleted because they could not bring the huge front-end loader onto my lawn, and that a special crew would be required. So far, as of this writing, the debris remains on the lawn. A DISASTER has been visited on our city by Mother Nature. Owing to the inadequacies of the power distribution system, our population has suffered. We are little better than a Third World country when it comes to the fragility of our power structure.

Now comes the gas bill. Does anybody really know what the financially ill-equipped, the poor, those in poverty will do with such horrendous gas bills? Isn't it time for somebody to take a look at what's so badly wrong with the distribution of natural gas and electricity in Greater Little Rock and the rest of the state? Compare these figures: On Oct. 3 we paid a gas bill of $15.89. On Nov. 11, the bill was $29.04. On Dec. 1, we paid $144.12. The latest bill was $298. IF OUR state is so weak in power distribution system, can the nation be far behind?

Consider California, the nation's richest and most populous state. A recent Washington Post report on its dilemma contained this alarming paragraph: "Blackouts rolled through towns and cities. Utilities teetered on bankruptcy. Industrial plants were idled. The state's main gasoline pipeline slowed to a trickle for want of pumping power, and elected officials were reduced to begging for electricity from Canadian dams." That's not Kosovo, or Mozambique, or the Congo. That's the United States. And it's in a state that has a gross national product larger than two dozen separate countries of the world. WHERE ARE we headed? Is our last gas bill for $298 as high as it's going to get? We are now seeing proof that the best way to bring the United States to its knees is to turn off our electric power and our natural gas. Why are we so ill-prepared? Richard Allin's Our Town column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and alternate Sundays. E-mail him at: rall@aristotle.net.

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), January 27, 2001