“It’s not like anybody screwed up totally”

Quote of the day, from city councilman Richard Conlin, in the P-I, looking ahead to the hearing he’s leading tonight on “Lessons from the Windstorm.” He’s talking about how city agencies, especially Seattle City Light, handled the storm’s aftermath, including the outages that left so many of us without power for so long. And he appropriately spotlights the fact that so many of us didn’t and couldn’t get any information about HOW long we would be without power. Even information on who had their power back on and who was left to work on, would have been great; during that long dark week, we were reduced to driving around once it started getting dark, to get a take on things. Really, for those of us who were out of power for days, did you imagine, when it went out, that it would take so long to get it back? (By the way, if you can’t make it to City Hall to tell your story tonight, you can watch the hearing live on the Seattle Channel, ch. 21, or a replay Friday morning.)

chet_desmond January 3, 2007 (1:08 pm)

Yeah right Conlin..

Robert January 3, 2007 (2:00 pm)

Would undergrounding the wires in heavily
forested areas help? I personally like to see the Mayor go on a big “let bury the wires” drive. I live in a beatiful West Seattle Neighborhood…except for the 90 year old telephone poles!

dq January 3, 2007 (10:30 pm)

I watched the meeting live today (Jan 3rd). If you didn’t see it, I highly recommend watching it on-line.

It was very evident that Seattle City Light has a huge management issue. The vast majority of attendees and speakers were folks who work in the field for SCL and each told nearly an indentical story of not having the basic tools (i.e. flashlight or chainsaw) and the fact that since 2004 they’ve had 200 vacancies due to “budget constraints” while Carrasco and his team make $2.5 million base salaries.

I sent Conlin an email afterwards asking if the non-existant Mayor was invited to the meeting since as he was the one who nominated Carrasco. I’ll be interested to hear the response.

chet_desmond January 4, 2007 (7:49 am)

Thanks dq .. looks like the city got caught with their pants down …. again. I hope you get a response. I have emailed people like Dow Constantine in the past with concerns and questions only to hear crickets.

Sorry, comment time is over.