One Million in Region Celebrated July 4 the Way the Founders Did

Without Electricity

More than 1 million homes and businesses in a swath from Indiana to Virginia remained without power on Wednesday, five days after deadly storms tore through the region.

The outage meant no July 4 Independence Day holiday for thousands of utility workers who scrambled to restore lingering power outages.

Although most of the region votes democratic, and therefor supports most efforts to choke off the supply of electricity to the rest of the world, they're remarkably whiny about it when they are forced to live without it themselves...

Taking Pepco to task
(The Washington Post, July 2, 2012; 8:45 PM)

My family and I relocated from Denver to Silver Spring last summer, just in time for the earthquake, tropical storm and now the derecho. Despite these events, we love the Washington area and, in particular, our neighborhood near downtown Silver Spring. What we cannot accept, however, are Pepco’s delays and lack of communication in responding to electric power outages [“Outages could last for days,” front page, July 1]. We’ve lived in areas — Denver, Chicago, Boston, Iowa — with far more severe weather than Washington. Nowhere else have we ever experienced outages of more than a day or two. And we understand these lengthy outages are commonplace here. What is so unique about this area that causes these extraordinary delays in restoring power? I’m not an expert in this subject,

 

After the storm: The good and the bad
(The Washington Post, July 3, 2012; 5:11 PM)

Petula Dvorak’s July 3 column “Zapped by a storm, Washington’s power crowd is on its sweaty knees,” was eloquent, but her unduly fatalistic argument plays into the hands of the corporate do-nothings at Pepco. Ms. Dvorak asks: “How can you drag a historic thunderstorm before a congressional subcommittee?” but the question is misplaced. One could, and should, drag in the executives of Pepco, the utility commissions, local government leaders and indeed federal officials, including Pentagon officials, to answer questions about why so little has been done these past decades to prevent a thunderstorm like this from having such devastating effects.