The power and message of blackouts
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
August 16, 2003
THE massive energy outage that swept through the eastern United States and Canada on Thursday, halting life to a virtual standstill and causing the death of an elderly American in the process, is another grim reminder of the transcendent power and message of blackouts.
When ours began on July 13, 1977 - the same night darkness descended upon New York City, the former regime sought to equate the two situations.
We chuckled then, believing that the Burnham administration was exaggerating the case.
The skeptics, of course, were right. Power was restored in New York City after 25 hours, while ours prolonged. Ours, because the regime largely ignored a Lionel Luckhoo commission warning that the energy generating network of the Guyana Electricity Corporation would collapse if urgent attention was not paid to rehabilitating the corporation's near-obsolete machinery.
New York suffered in other ways. Plunging the Big Apple into darkness on a sweltering night, the July 1977 blackout sent looters into a frenzy and left the state teetering near anarchy.
Mayor Abraham Beame later called it "a night of terror". Yet it wasn't the first time that blackout had occurred in a city that mesmerizes us with its high-tech accomplishments.
In 1965, a power outage darkened much of the northeast in what was a much larger but far less chaotic event.
We're not in any way belittling the scourge of blackouts that we here have been enduring since 1977, anymore than we imagine some will shrug off the impact of Thursday's outage on the lives of Americans and Canadians and on emerging economies in this hemisphere.
As small as ours is in comparison to North America's, power outage agonizes us to the point of frustration.
But the Guyana and North American situations compel attention to governmental or company negligence as a factor of technological failures.
In Guyana, government erred not only when it brushed aside Sir Lionel Luckhoo's recommendation, but also when, years later, it opted for a second hand ten-megawatt floating barge from Miami instead of a 30-megawatt generating set from Italy - even though Italy was offering the latter at almost the same price (approximately US$2.8 million) that the barge was costing us.
The result: the barge floated out of existence after generating no more than four megawatts of electricity and then bursting into flames, sending millions of taxpayers' dollars a-waste.
We are suffering from those errors up to today because the current administration cannot seem to muster up, on its own, the kind of money that is required to increase the generating capacity of the national grid to meet our immediate and medium-term needs.
As we "penned" this editorial, Canadian officials were insisting that the massive power cut across the northeast United States and parts of Canada originated in America. And U.S. power workers were blaming Canada.
In the hours of confusion after Thursday's outage, conflicting explanations in Canada attributed the blackout first to lightning in Niagara, then to a fire at a Niagara plant, and next to fire at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant.
But wherever it originated, and whatever the source of the problem responsible for the intricate power grid shared by the northeastern United States and Ontario tripping out of service, both nations have a Herculean task to try to avoid a repeat of Thursday's disaster.
The lesson for us in Guyana must be that we leave no stones unturned in overcoming the nightmare of blackouts that have plagued us for so long, and avoid having to confront another series of woes created in the aftermath of such an enormous outage.
