General Infrastructure Discussion

[BCPhil]

Originally Posted by Kisai

I expect that businesses will perform adequate risk assessment.

If you live in your own house with it's own well and septic system, you are 100% responsible for dealing with any natural disaster, regardless if your house is on a hill, the foot of a hill, or in the flood plain. Expecting the power to stay on and power a dozen fridges full of hunted food or beer is an overly optimistic risk assessment.

Who is talking about anyone remotely like that? This didn't happen in the backwoods country. This happened in Coquitlam and Surrey. I know a lot of people treat Surrey like some podunk backwater, but the city IS on Metro water and sewers.

Someone who lives in a 600sq foot condo or apartment with no balcony and is for some damn reason is operating all their websites off their home internet connection also has an overly optimistic risk assessment.

Again, who is talking about anyone like this? Maybe there was 1 guy in this situation.

So either we are all redneck bumpkins or we are all neckbeards running a cluster on our Shaw connection? You are completely ignoring the average majority.

The problem with both of these locations assuming the power will never go off for more than 5 minutes, is that the people occupying these premises are not prepared, at all, for any kind of inconvenience.

If you operate a business at home, you spend 1000$ on UPS. If you have thousands of dollars in computer equipment, you would wouldn't put it in an apartment in the first place, you'd store it at a data center where they do have generators (not that it isn't possible to have the generators fail due to bad engineering.)

Likewise the person out in the boonies who doesn't want to loose thousands of dollars in food or other products would have a generator. To do otherwise is to accept that risk.

So, really, either we are all redneck bumpkins or we are all neckbeards running a cluster on our Shaw connection? You are seriously completely ignoring the average majority.

Like I said, the angle of the news reports is tried to frame a story of "BC Hydro is to blame" for losses when the combination of wind storm and dry summer is. Trees that may have been planted over 30 years ago fell over. If you live in BC, wind and rain are predictable several days in advance.

I would hazard a guess that in a windstorm, not every tree that falls over was planted since the last windstorm. Old trees fall over all the time. A thousand fell over in Stanley park alone in 2006 (and I bet most of them were well over 30 years old), yet 250,000 customers were without power after that storm vs 500,000 after this one.

Yes, dry conditions and winds from the unusual south didn't help, but why did a storm with winds peaking at 90km/h knock out double the customers as a windstorm with winds peaking around 175km/h? I think we have a right to complain until we find out why.

If it really is just because it was dry, and that is the only reason, then we really need to complain. Because this might become the new normal (dry summers followed by severe storms) and BC Hydro should look into exactly why so many customers were knocked out, and how to prevent it in the future. It's great to be prepared for an earthquake that might happen within the lifetimes of my great grandchildren, but this can happen once or twice a year going forward.

Nobody has any right to be mad at BC Hydro for losing business. That is poor risk taking on the part of the business owner.

The people who lost a few hundred dollars in food and couldn't flush the toilet for 3 days... that's a minor inconvenience, and should be covered by home owner/renters insurance. No insurance? That's again a risk willingly accepted.

I don't know if I would use the word minor. To me, a minor inconvenience is going to Tim Hortons and they are out of double chocolate donuts and I have to get chocolate glazed. If I had $300 in my pocket and lost it, I don't think I would turn to my wife and say, "Oh well, that was minor."

I can't imagine perceiving this as minor if I had children to feed and take care of. The hassle of getting them fed, bathed and dressed without power and hot water (let alone several people sharing an unflushing toilet if all water was out) would be more than inconvenient.

And I can't imagine how infuriated I would be if I was being marginalized by lucky people who skated through the situation without their lights flickering while I had to go into credit card debt to replace a fridge full of food for a family of 5 right after spending my paycheck on back to school shit. And what if I couldn't go to work because they were closed too (they don't have to pay shift workers if there is no work to be done), so on top of it all I was not making money. I would be pissed.

And dealing with insurance companies is a pain in the ass. Even with insurance, most people would be unwise to get them involved unless they like paying deductibles and higher premiums. Either way (making a claim or not), people are out money.

Real people are facing real hardships. And just expecting people to shut up and spend their way out of this is heartless at best.

Look at the outrage directed towards translink when Skytrain went down, and all they did was make less than 10% of the population late by an hour or two. 500,000 Hydro customers is around half the regional population, and many were without power for well over a day. Translink gave everyone an entire free day of riding transit (even if you weren't stuck in the mess). BC Hydro won't give you much as a $5 rebate to help you buy ice they told you to buy on Twitter. At least the Smart meters should tell Hydro who wen't without power for a long period, and those people could be given a little pity and a break on their bill (if Hydro can't tell who was off the grid for more than 8 hours, then what was the point of the billion dollars spent on smart meters?).

Anyway I'm not entirely without sympathy for those who lost power, I just find the news media fishing for a story that just isn't there a poor excuse to dump on BC Hydro and by extension the Provincial government.

Why isn't there a story here?

They spent $500 million on an information system that didn't inform anyone of anything. Putting aside the scale and cause of the outages, how can BC Hydro spend that much of your money on something that doesn't work and just get away with it?

I hate the NDP over the Fast Ferries and they deserved to be kicked out of government, but at least the boats were able to float.