More Phenology: In Maryland It's Worse

So I went to the computer center to enjoy the air conditioning, and here's what came in the e-mail:

http://news.yahoo.com/maryland-pepco-customers-call-drastic-changes-six-days-215500053.html

This is alarming. The part of Silver Spring from which Carol Bengle Gilbert is writing is about a mile upstream from where I lived through two heat waves, without air conditioning, in the 1980s. They have plenty of green space, cool streams, and swing sets for kids to cool off, and not even as many mosquitoes as you'd expect, because of the birds in the tree canopy. What about the job of being a writer? Oh well, anybody who writes for the Internet in Silver Spring undoubtedly has a closet full of spare batteries for the laptop. What about disabled people who depend on electric-powered gadgets to treat medical conditions? A few years ago CBG mentioned one of those in her family. And they're not expecting to get electricity back until Friday? This was written...today, Saturday?

Right. I'm pretty sure I've met CBG in real life, assuming that her original Associated Content avatar was a picture of her taken in the 1980s. We weren't next-door neighbors or best buddies, but were neighbors in a general sense. If they have to, her family could rent a van and drive out here for a week. I know they're reasonably clean, law-abiding, and quiet; everybody in that neighborhood is.

But of course a 450-mile drive is not the ideal solution for anyone who needs electric-powered gadgets to treat a disability...and she's talking about a whole retirement project full of people like that. Is anyone out there closer to Silver Spring? If so, do you have a better idea?

I like the image of the boot applied to Pepco's backside. In suburban Maryland it's a double image; you can picture the unsatisfactory company as a man (although that's edging toward violence) or as an illegally parked car with that dreaded clamp locked onto it. Pepco needs both kinds of "boot." The push forward, and also the restraint against illegal movement in directions other than what is required.

More specifically...in Virginia, Apco has already unveiled a plan for the next four years that would probably have seemed adequate in 1950, relying on tree pruning and herbicides. This kind of plan needs to be "booted" in the D.C.-specific sense. Utility companies need to be restrained from lazy-minded schemes to poison the land, and prodded toward sensible plans to bury cables.