The Edge of Extortion (Updated): How Florence Hurt Inland Virginia

(Updated for those who read all the way down and wanted to know: Yes, someone "voted" to keep me and the cats on the grid. I'm glad. I'm even grateful, which is a horrible feeling to have toward a fellow mortal; gratitude, like worship, should be directed toward God. We should show gratitude for our fellow humans by repaying the nice things they do for us. And yes, I have a workable plan in mind for doing that; you know who you are and what the plan is.

I'm still not pleased with the outcome. I still want the companies to be required to appreciate customers. Not only should all property owners have a legal right to get ourselves off the grid, at least for our primary energy requirements, as fast as possible; not only should companies be required to meet our private requirements for any use we may allow them to make of solar, water, or pedal power generators on our property; but also, allowing a reasonable amount of time, the companies need to be making steady progress toward relying on our surplus private energy supply rather than on dams or coal-burning plants as a primary energy source for everyone. We may always need the companies and a few of the big unsustainable plants they've built, but we don't need them as much as they've tried to make people think, and they should be forced to acknowledge continually that they need us.

Not only do I agree that people should stop using electricity before they run up bills they can't pay; I'd be in favor of people's being able to shut off their own main switches, at that point, without the company sending anyone out. No kilowatts flowing into the house, no mounting bill! But I'm opposed to the companies being allowed to charge extra fees, especially when the fee is more than twice the amount of the unpaid bill, for disconnecting people's electricity. It does not cost $50 to flip a switch, nor should companies be allowed to think in terms of "punishing" the customers on whom their existence depends.)

Hurricane Florence came and went, with none of the melodrama associated with the word "hurricane," but a lot of rain. Two feet, about 0.6 metres, of rain is bad enough in low-lying ground, but as the rain moved west, more of it poured down over the East Coast. A lot of buildings got wet. Damage was done to the power grid.

What do our beloved utility companies do in this kind of situation? They finance rapid restoration of service, in a weather emergency, by creative billing techniques.

The biggest electricity bill I ever got was the "estimated" bill for a month during most of which there was no grid-based electric power in Scott County. When I went online that winter, I went online from Kingsport. I received a bill for approximately four times my average bill for months when I'd been using refrigerator and water heater and all. I paid up, complaining vigorously, and received a refund a few months later. I knew the money had been used to bring in laborers up from Atlanta, down from Cleveland, to clean up cables that were buried under a foot of snow.

This month, I had some other bills to pay, so I let the bill for electricity wait. After all, the amount that was overdue was, what, $25? I'm frugal with electricity, and it's been a mild summer, with little need for climate control. My bills have been below $20 each month. "We don't send people out to disconnect people for that kind of small change," I've heard, in other years.

The hurricane changed everything. I went home yesterday and found that my electricity had indeed been disconnected. The exact amount overdue: $19.43.

I have no use for the whole idea of a central grid, and monthly bills, and all those dangerous cables strung through forests to crash down every time the wind blows. The weather was quite pleasant. After eating a cold dinner I lighted a candle, worked a New York Times Sunday crossword I'd been saving, and went to bed as usual.

One of those unusual bills I had to pay this month is for repairing my own dear desktop computer. I should probably explain this, too.

All North Americans are not actually the same size, but almost all North American furniture comes in the same size. Basically that means too small to be ergonomically correct for most men and too big to be ergonomically correct for most women. Massage therapists can make livings just treating the aches and pains people develop from working at one-size-for-all desks every day.

In my home office, there is no one-size-for-all desk. Of the three I used to own, I've sold two; one is still in Grandma Bonnie Peters' home office, where its being too high doesn't bother her so much because she spends so little time typing at it. I sit on a nice low bench made by putting a board over a camp cot, which is the right distance from the floor for my less-than-5'10" legs, and put my computer on an unmatched pair of nice low tables with the big fat CRT monitor slightly higher than the keyboard, which is just right for my less-than-5'10" arms. I can type literally all day long. I've made a habit of giving myself hand, eye, and walk-about breaks at intervals in whatever I'm typing, but I have, as an experiment, typed in my home office for twenty hours. No shoulder pain. No carpal tunnel syndrome.

This, of course, was when I had the desktop computer's keyboard right at the edge of its table, so it fitted right under my hands and I worked with my elbows at a right angle. At a standard desk, even with the desktop computer's keyboard, my elbows would be at a less comfortable acute angle. I used to get cramps in my right shoulder from using a desktop computer mouse at the computer center.

The desktop computer eventually used up its memory. A hard drive had to be replaced. That was done at Christmas. It cost over $100. In the shop the computer came on flashing a message that a cable was not connected. "That doesn't seem to mean anything," said the man who'd installed the hard drive, "it boots up and runs just fine."

It did--but not for long. The message flashed every time I started the computer and, toward the end of June, the new hard drive died. Back to the shop I went. "How can we back up the files in case the next hard drive dies, too?" I asked. So the man looked inside the computer and found that, although the cable it had was adequate for all the actual work I'd been doing on it for twenty years, the newer hard drives--like the one installed last winter--were designed to require an additional cable, which "everybody" had already installed to power a modem. (My own desktop has never had a modem.) No wonder the new hard drive had burned out fast. It had been drawing more electricity through an inadequate supply...

I have been working on laptop computers at home. It's not obvious, to the minority of humankind who are exactly 5'10", that putting the battery compartment out in front of the keyboard would cause carpal tunnel syndrome. In fact that design innovation was touted as helping prevent carpal tunnel syndrome in taller typists. Let's just say that having the battery compartment in front of the keyboard forces me to type with both wrists and elbows at odd angles, so every day I have backaches and, if I've been seriously writing, numbness and tingling, and also a stiff neck from sitting with my shoulders hunched up as if I were doing an impression of Richard flippin' Nixon...so, just using a laptop as my main computer is not an option.

Let's just say that, even in winter, I don't want the radiation of a laptop going into my actual physical lap all day, so that's not an option either. Laptops as main computers equal disability. Desktop computer is a physical necessity for me.

Electricity is necessary only for the computer. If I don't have a computer at home...I'd miss being able to write on weekends, but I wouldn't miss being on the grid, either. There are public computer centers. The Internet Portal does at last have a locally sponsored storefront, and if I weren't paying for electricity at home, I could use the money to pay for it at the store, stop using up bandwidth at cafe/school/library computer centers, and start storekeeping already.

I've not had the extra money to do it, but for the past two years I've been thinking seriously that even a gas-powered generator, much as I'd prefer solar or pedal power, could give me the best of both worlds.

I've also heard, not in Virginia but in less civilized parts of the country, of people having gone completely off the grid and then being told they couldn't prove they were living on property that somebody wanted to grab using "eminent domain." I know very few natural-born citizens of these United States who want to live on property without a cushy paved driveway; that does not mean that assets like the mountain spring, the natural waterfall, and the sunny bank, might not attract evildoers who don't intend to live there.

https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/15

"Farmers are the new Indians," somebody told Kathleen Norris, years ago. Hah. I actually am part "Indian," some of the last of the indigenous blood on the ancestral land. I'm not young. I've had a rich life. I'm not eager to die on my land rather than live off it, but I'm not afraid to do that, either. (Introverts avoid unnecessary risks, so we seem cautious, even timid, when we do things like buckle our seat belts; that's in no way to be confused with a fear of necessary risks.)

So when I talked to the anonymous robot-girl at the utility company, I had all this in mind. Any attempt to extort money from me will cost your company a lot more than you hope to gain, I said.

You pulled this stunt in 2016, I said, and as a result you lost all payments from me for six months. And it would've been a lot longer than that if relatives hadn't wanted electric heat and lights for Thanksgiving. And, due to Mother's health, we're not planning Thanksgiving at my house this year. You can lose a whole account for ever if you tick me off again.

Robot-girl kept repeating "I'm sorry," obviously not being it, and repeating that the new company policy now required that somebody scrape up not only the total amount of the bill, but a fee that would raise the total price above $100, until I think even the battery-powered phone I was using got bored and switched itself off.

There is a church fund that's set up for the express purpose of keeping the lights on at the homes of widows who don't ordinarily depend on handouts, who give something back to the church. I'm not a regular church member, not all that old, and not in any physical danger, but I did happen to have a nice blanket to give to the church, worth more than I was asking for; I did happen to have an ongoing writing job that would make it very inconvenient not to have a computer at home this weekend.

Let's see what happens, I said to myself, and I walked up the street to the church, blanket in hand. I found the church secretary talking on the phone.

There is no way...I could not believe what I was hearing. "There must be some mistake...A, could you check this? B, could you call C? They're threatening to cut off our electricity in the church...I know we've paid the bill, but..."

The church was being double-billed, just as I'd been double-billed in 2016!

"If we have the money, we'll pay your bill," the church secretary said hopelessly. I knew and she knew that the mistake was not made by the church, and will not be found and fixed for a few months; and meanwhile the church does not have the money for me, nor does it have the money for who knows how many old widows are on electric-powered oxygen pumps and are being hit up for money this month. The one thing I've done today that I'm not proud of was asking. On hearing what the church secretary was saying I should have just walked out the door--although I don't know how much she would have suffered from curiosity.

I enjoy having electricity; I use electricity as a tool of my trade. I do not, however, need electricity.

Time for a vote, Gentle Readers. What do you think I should do? It is now possible to vote with Paypal!

If you think everyone should be charitable, because people on the East Coast are less prepared to go off the grid than I am and keeping them on the grid really does take money and everybody should be willing to contribute something to disaster relief, click here to pay the bill:

https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/100

If you think I should just go off the grid permanently now, click here to pay for the generator to be put in before the cold weather arrives:

https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/125

(Well, those links have served their original purpose, but people can still use them to pay for more of whatever they want from this web site. We can even add one. The church has a sleek-looking web site at http://www.fbcgatecity.org/ , and they'll gladly process checks sent directly to them by mail, but they don't seem to have Paypal.me links. Paypal users who'd like to contribute to the emergency fund may use this one to route cash directly to the First Baptist Church. Their emergency fund is distributed as sudden needs are reported so it's more likely to be used for the benefit of relatively well-off widows who live in Gate City and attend Baptist services, but they don't discriminate against non-members, non-Christians, or people in other towns, at all. To support the fund by Paypal, please be sure to type "FBC" into the message field when using this link:

https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/25

Paypal.me links are price-specific; I picked US$25 as an average amount people contribute to church funds, with kids putting a dollar in the plate and businessmen writing checks for 10% of their weekly income, but here's a tip. You can go into the browser bar, backspace over the number at the end of a Paypal.me link, and type in the number of whole monetary units you want to contribute, and the system will generate a new page for whatever whole number you type in. If you type in "FBC" I'll carry that amount of cash to the church--and if it's an amount that looks silly for an adult to deliver to a church, I'll mention your screen name.)

Morgan Griffith on Puerto Rico, and Other Thoughts

Due to timing, this web site has missed posting several of Morgan Griffith's e-mails in a timely fashion. I regret this, and apologize to readers, who the computer shows are reading these posts. Virginia readers can always check Congressman Griffith's web site but, if you're already here...and some of these e-mails really are too good to miss. Like these suggestions for the longsuffering U.S. citizens on Puerto Rico...seriously, we have power grid problems in the Blue Ridge Mountains like nobody's business, and I think microgrids and home-based solar (and pedal) power are excellent ideas.

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"
Lessons from the Storms
The 2017 hurricane season has been the most active and destructive to the United States in a number of years. From Puerto Rico to Texas, storms have caused devastation, some of which lingers long after the hurricanes have dissipated. The challenge of rebuilding is daunting.
As part of the rebuilding process, we should learn how to better prepare for similar events in the future. The House Energy and Commerce Committee, on which I serve, is committed to evaluating preparations for and responses to these storms. We hope that thoroughly understanding what worked and what didn’t in the 2017 hurricane season will help the country prepare for future natural disasters. The lessons learned from this year can have positive impacts across the country, not just in those areas vulnerable to hurricanes.
On October 24, the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing on how the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services responded to Puerto Rico. I had the opportunity to chair this hearing as the Vice Chairman. We learned that the hospital ship USNS Comfort has not been fully utilized. The Food and Drug Administration also detailed setbacks to Puerto Rico’s medical products industry, which is important to the supply both in Puerto Rico and in the rest of the United States, and its plans to address potential shortages while manufacturers restore their operations.
The Energy Subcommittee, on which I also serve, will follow suit on November 2 by reviewing how energy infrastructure weathered the storms. I expect there will be important lessons at this hearing. Throughout this year, the Subcommittee has held hearings on the electrical grid, and Puerto Rico’s struggles with restoring power have highlighted the grid’s vulnerabilities as well as possible solutions.
One of several innovations put forward to get Puerto Rico back online is the use of microgrids, defined by the Microgrid Institute as “a small energy system capable of balancing captive supply and demand resources to maintain stable service within a defined boundary.” Energy Secretary Rick Perry recently brought attention to microgrids when he suggested that small modular nuclear reactors would suit Puerto Rico’s needs: “Wouldn’t it make abundant good sense if we had small modular reactors that literally you could put in the back of C-17 [military cargo] aircraft, transport it to an area like Puerto Rico, and push it out the back end, crank it up and plug it in?”* The idea may sound far-fetched, but this technology is actually in development in the national labs overseen by the U.S. Department of Energy and may be on the U.S. market by the middle of the next decade. Besides nuclear, renewable power could fuel microgrids as well.
Microgrids make sense for an island like Puerto Rico, but there are other contexts where they would be suitable. While the technology could be used anywhere, if flooding, a snowstorm, or another catastrophe cut off a town in the mountains from the rest of the electrical grid, microgrids could keep the lights on until conditions returned to normal.
We’ll take a look at how microgrids might help Puerto Rico and consider how they could be used as part of disaster response in the future anywhere in the country. This is just one example of how we can better understand what works and what doesn’t. If the lessons learned from these storms better prepare us for the next one, these tragedies will not have been in vain.
The “Windshield Phenomenon”
A recent study published in the scientific journal PLOS One suggests that insects are in decline. One way this finding has been made more tangible is the “windshield phenomenon.” You would once have plenty of bugs splattered on your windshield driving down a highway, but now there are fewer bugs to meet their demise as you head on down the road.
While insects are an important part of any ecosystem, I am glad this study has come out now and not, say, a year ago. If it had, the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency may have sought to ban windshields to protect the insects, or perhaps mandated that all cars be outfitted with a soft net mounted a few inches in front of their hoods and windshields so bugs would be protected from the windshield until they could fly away safely.
For History Lovers
For those of you who love history, a friend recently sent me an interesting article about Greek resistance to the Axis powers in World War II. The Greeks’ tenacious defense changed the course of the war. You can read the article here.
If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. Also on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes recently taken on the floor of the House of Representatives.

* “Puerto Rico Eyed As Electricity Grid Innovation Testing Ground,” https://www.bna.com/puerto-rico-eyed-n73014467356/
"

Lloyd Marcus Remembers the Pumphrey Flood

A memory worth sharing...

http://www.lloydmarcus.com/?p=3528

"Using a rowboat, Dad and my 12 year old brother David rescued neighbors stuck on their roofs. Dad helped those in need of assistance filling out forms and was the community advocate with the Red Cross. We, as a community, helped each other get our homes back together. With her floors covered in mud, I remember washing dishes and cleaning Mrs. Johnson’s kitchen. We were Pumphrey. The hurricane made us family."

Sandy Relief: Challenge for Republicans (With Kinky Fantasies!)

Still worried about that bad old Fiscal Cliff, Congress voted against using federal disaster funds for a proposed "Sandy Relief" bill that promised to help hurricane survivors in New York and New Jersey. Some of them. Somewhat. Apparently the perception was that the bill would've helped greedheads more than actual hurricane survivors.

Madeleine Morgenstern shares quotes and pictures of Republicans angrily denouncing their own party:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/furious-chris-christie-rips-john-boehner-over-canceled-sandy-vote/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/angry-republican-rep-peter-king-tells-new-yorkers-not-to-give-money-to-gop-following-no-sandy-vote/

Below the video clips, there are lists of some of the reasons why Republicans voted no to "Sandy Relief."

This web site maintains that New York, where a volunteer relief worker was physically attacked for doubting that New York can bleep-bleep well take care of its bleepin' own...aw, for pity's sake. This web site "refreshes" and thinks about New Jersey.

Glenn Beck achieved a furiously controversial bestseller by stating, in one of his books, that he agreed with former President Grover Cleveland that the federal government should never be asked to do the work of a private charity. (That's not to say that John Boehner, a wealthy man, shouldn't be signing cheques left and right...it's strictly to say that those cheques should not be drawn on taxpayers' money.) Naturally, since Beck is the founder and chief of The Blaze, those two Blaze stories are festooned with snarky comments to the effect that the government shouldn't do disaster relief.

Think not? Maybe not. Maybe in a pure-minded, public-spirited, righteous community such as these Blaze readers undoubtedly think they inhabit, private citizens don't want to give government a chance to do disaster relief. After all, private citizens can, if they choose, get things done so much more efficiently, seeing and addressing so many more of the real problems, and with absolutely no temptation to throw away their money on "pork."

Right. (If you guessed that this is one of the times when I feel aware of not being a Republican, then you're absolutely right.) Republicans, other than King and Christie, got their way. From the viewpoint of pure, abstract fiscal conservatism, I'll even agree with'em. Now I'd like to see them put their money where their flippin' flappin' mouths are.

Backs, too. Come ooonnnn, guys...y'know Morgenstern and I want to see some videos of young, sleek, good-looking Republicans pounding down shingles and hanging doors and all such manly things. I want to see Rick Santorum crawling under somebody's sink. Can Ken Cuccinelli rewire an apartment block? Right, that's a private fantasy I do not necessarily share with owners of frozen-up broken-out sinks in New Jersey, but you must admit...

Fantasies aside...I seriously want to read about, and see, Republicans privately doing better by New York and New Jersey property owners than the federal government can do. Let our left wing know what our right wing doeth, for once. I want to see hurricane survivors waving envelopes prominently marked "From the [Name of Area] Republican Party," pulling cheques out of them. I want to read about the hurricane survivors our Republicans have "adopted." (Hello, Congressman Griffith.) I want all my favorite conservative pages to discuss exactly what remains to be done in the hurricane strike zone, and who's doing it with his or her own private funds, or which group funds are being created for it. I want to see persistent hurricane damage addressed on Fundly, Chip In, and Indiegogo.

You don't want to pay into a federal disaster fund? Cool. I don't either. Nor do I think our federal government can afford to do much of anything but pay down its existing debt--in principle. So I repeat, put your money where your mouth is.

I don't have any money. Right. Send me some. I will rent a van, a video camera, and some Republicans with proven reconstruction and renovation skills, and you can all see live video footage of well-preserved co-ed fiscal conservatives in tight jeans, crawling under sinks, pumping out toilets, I mean, name your kinks, you fund it, we'll do it. And people outside the family think we all look decent in tight jeans, too.

But if we're going to say the federal government shouldn't be doing charity work...put your money where your mouth is!