When Lightning Strikes

Here in Nashville, the state capital and a hub of finance, culture, and education, we are experiencing First World adventures in Third World living. Every other thunderstorm we seem to have massive power outages despite a campaign by our electric utility provider, which is not privately held or a traded company, but part of city government itself, to cut down every tree around our above-ground electric lines, including some old growth beauties that had stood for centuries and denuding many areas of much of their legacy of natural beauty, in what was euphemistically called a "trimming program" but in the event has been an arboreal massacre. And to no end- the power outages are as bad as before the trimming program was initiated. The discomfort of four or so hours of no electricity to one's home on a ninety plus degree day is certainly no more than an inconvenience for a healthy adult, but what of an infant, or in the particular case of my family, two cancer survivors, one with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder on almost constant oxygen and the other whose chemotherapy destroyed her ability to cool normally when it blew her thyroid- such a disruption in electricity can be life threatening. Nashville Electric Service, that as the rate payer and as a public utility (the taxpayer as well ) pays its leader about as much as the President of the United States and with one winter outage at our family home lasting more than ten days and blackouts every other time it storms, has a leader Decosta Jenkins whose performance is about on a par with Obama's. When the lights go out in Georgia, it makes for a great song, when they go out in Nashville, it makes for a nightmare for NES customers, a great sales pitch for backup generators, and another lucrative day for NES President and CEO Decosta Jenkins who draws over a quarter of a million dollars every year to not quite succeed at keeping our lights on but regularly raises the electric portion of our utility bills.