Seattle Area Outage - Unions

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WXMotorSports DecalsPartsAccs

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:unsure:Only the messenger here...



KIRO 7 Radio News had newscasters interviewing the Pudget Sound Employees (PSE) & Contractors out in the field the past few days restoring power.



What was reported:

Union PSE/Contractors would NOT work past 10PM trying to restore power to the area. When asked why? "Contact the Union spokesperson for details". And, interesting enough many crews reported that they didn't have enough supplies to finish the job.



However, PSE claimed they were working around the clock to restore power. The largest Sub Station had 100+ trucks sitting in their lot doing nothing.



The six trucks that were parked in our neighborhood for 4 hours just sitting around, I guess they call that assessing the damage, letf at 10Pm and showed back up at 8am.



Many areas are not even on the schedule to be fixed. You will have one part of the grid completely up the next grid down, the next one up with NO trucks around working in the area.



Some areas will not have power till the end of the week and this was just a wind storm with the biggest gust hitting 69 mph.
 
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We got our power back this morning. The crew that was working around our area worked till atleast 12 one night when I drove past. I still think they could have gotten power back a little sooner. We were out since thursday night till around 6 this morning. Atleast I got a hot shower in my own house.
 
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Solidarity -- The only useful union in the past 25 years. Brought down the Communists in Poland , which helped bring down the Berlin Wall and the mighty USSR.
 
Yeah, I really liked it back when I did "dog and pony" computer shows. Remember once setting up my booth at the Jacob Javitz center, having to wait two hours for a union electrician because we couldn't plug our own power strips in. They weren't even power strips we brought with us, they were the facility's strips...we just couldn't plug them in.



TJR
 
SST. We have Pacific Power here on the North Oregon Coast. I can tell you that they have a totally different work ethic. How do I know? I've been listening to them on my scanner and they are working around the clock even while the storm was at it's peak. When you listen to them you can't help but appreciate their professionalism. One crew had to evacuate because the trees were falling all around them and they had to cut their way out. They brought in a crew from as far away as Utah. Pacific Power is unionized but I think the big difference is they are private as opposed to a public utility.

We get a lot of strong storms here but this was one of the worst I can remember.
 
Yeah, I really liked it back when I did "dog and pony" computer shows. Remember once setting up my booth at the Jacob Javitz center, having to wait two hours for a union electrician because we couldn't plug our own power strips in. They weren't even power strips we brought with us, they were the facility's strips...we just couldn't plug them in.
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It's the same way at our shows at McCormick Place in Chicago. We decided to put plugs on our conveyors instead of the usual hard wiring. This way all we had to pay an electrician to do is run power to the conveyors. We could plug them in. Before that, we had to let an electrican hard-wire the conveyor power. Two different charges.



It takes 10 minutes to run all the power we need in our booths, but we have to pay the 2-hour minimum. I need to get my electrician's license and move to Chi-town I guess.



In the north-east, I wonder if the Unions feel responcible for the 12 deaths and untold hundreds that have been affected by Carbon Monoxide poisoning (that's another topic for another day).



Probably not. Too smug for that.
 
It's easy to blame the union for those problems, and I'm not a huge supporter of unions, but things aren't always as they seem. For example, and I'm not saying I know this for sure, but managers may not have wanted to pay (or didn't have the budget) for the electricians to work through the night, OR, even worse, management does not have a provision in the collective bargaining agreement for union employees to work through emergencies. If it's true in either case, shame on them.



My daughter was without power in the St. Louis area for five days in sub-zero temperatures just a few weeks ago. That outage was a result of previous decisions made by the largest electrical utility in the area not to update/upgrade their infrastructure. There's no fingerprints of a union on that foul-up.
 
but managers may not have wanted to pay (or didn't have the budget) for the electricians to work through the night
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Utilities usually have insurance to pay for these type of problems. It's also part of the reason that cost per KwH is so high.





My daughter was without power in the St. Louis area for five days in sub-zero temperatures just a few weeks ago
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My brother and sister-in-law, parents and many friends were as well. A good friend of mine was killed when another driver couldn't figure out what to do at a 4-way light with the power off.



This shows to me why it should be a requirement that power lines should be underground. High initial cost, but you don't have frozen trees knocking power out.
 
Part of the problem in our area, and this falls on the local util companies, there are 1000s of trees that sit close to the power lines. I've lived in cities where your tree and or shrubs have to be below the power lines. If they are growing into the powerlines, the utils will cut them for you and bill you for the service. This is not enforced in the Seattle metro area. Our neighborhood has underground utils, however, the substation, failed and we lost power. The older houses across the street have utils above ground as well as 90% of the area. All the power outages were caused by falling trees on powerlines.



Don't even get me started on the retards that were using generators and BBQ grilles indoors to heat their houses. They found a family of four this morning all dead because of a BBQ being used in the house for cooking and heating.
 
Here in St. Louis, there do not seem to be any ordinances regarding trees and power lines. The utility does trim trees, but only in their easements and they can't even do them all. But, the real problem is when whole trees and large branches not even near the lines, break and fall into the lines. It would be impossible to trim enough to eliminate that problem. When over 1 million customers loose power due to tens of thousands of line breaks, it is going to take some time and lots of people to restore service. During the outage here, over 7,000 linemen from 13 or 14 states were working 24-7 and it took over a week.
 
I'm in an area of older contruction, real old, and almost all the power lines are above ground. Fortunately our weather is not normally very severe, but outages happen and the poles and lines are unsightly. I wish that little by little the utility companies would move all that stuff underground.
 
In the north-east, I wonder if the Unions feel responcible for the 12 deaths and untold hundreds that have been affected by Carbon Monoxide poisoning (that's another topic for another day).
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What are you refering to? The Sago mine disaster?





Tom
 
How do you know there were no "fingerprints"? Maybe the unions cost them so much they couldn't afford the upgrade. That's a nice "guess" though, but if I were one to talk about something I had no details about, I wouldn't venture to guess anything.
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But, hey Q, thanks for making my point. SST was pointing fingers at the union when he had no such knowledge. I was just raising other possibilities.



Anyway, if you're a leader/manager and have unions to deal with, they're just another factor in managing your business just like environmental issues, insurance issues, debt/revenue issues, etc. You can't use any of them as an excuse for poor management practices. If they exist in your world, you have to deal with them.
 
But, hey Q, thanks for making my point. SST was pointing fingers at the union when he had no such knowledge. I was just raising other possibilities.
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Did you actually read my post? I was only stating what the radio station was airing. Read the post again.
 
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Quote:



In the north-east, I wonder if the Unions feel responcible for the 12 deaths and untold hundreds that have been affected by Carbon Monoxide poisoning (that's another topic for another day).





What are you refering to? The Sago mine disaster?
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Typo.... meant to say North-West.... Seattle where the rest of the conversation revolves around. The people being found dead because of using BBQ's to heat their house and such. Even though the bag of charcoal clearly states DO NOT BURN INDOORS DUE TO CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING.



According to the initial post, the unions were not exactly busting ass to get power restored and people were getting desperate, hence why the unions need to accept some of the blame (if the initial story is true) for people dying from cold/CO poisoning.



 

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