CLEVELAND
No power, no water
By Martha Grevatt
Cleveland
Not only were workers in this metropolitan
area without electricity for half a day because of the collapse
of the power system on Aug. 14, but the city's electrically
powered water pumps shut down. In addi tion, the beaches were
closed after untreated sewage was found in Lake Erie.
It was not until four days later that residents were told
their water was safe to drink.
Now it appears quite plausible that Akron-based FirstEnergy,
the fourth-larg est investor-owned power company in the nation
and supplier to nearly all of North ern Ohio, may have
triggered what became a cascading crisis. Residents and the
mayor of Eastlake, where FirstEnergy operates an aging
coal-fired power plant, report an explosion and an unusual
amount of fly ash deposits at least two hours before the
widespread power failure. One resident compared it to "a
snowstorm in August."
FirstEnergy denies that an explosion occurred but admits
that the alarm screen for monitoring problems was not working.
An industry group attributed the initial outage to the failure
of five Ohio transmission lines, four of which are wholly or
partially owned by FirstEnergy, and also criticized the company
for not notifying neighboring energy suppliers in a timely
fashion. The transmission lines began failing at least an hour
before those in other parts of the United States and
Canada.
FirstEnergy is notorious here for the slipshod maintenance
that led its Davis-Besse nuclear plant to develop a
football-sized hole. If not discovered, it could have led to a
catastrophe far worse than the recent emergency.
Any worker over 40 remembers the hard-fought battle to save
the Municipal Light plant, which gave new meaning to the slogan
"power to the people." Few would be surprised if this
profit-hungry utility baron contributed to the problem.
Least surprised would be hundreds of laid-off utility
workers, casualties of the drive to "cut costs" that has
accelerated nationwide since deregulation began.
Reprinted from the Aug. 28, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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