Acton Institute PowerBlog - Entries from Monday, May 5, 2008

Daily Times of Pakistan:

LAHORE: Electricity shortage has exceeded 3,500 megawatts and load shedding is likely to increase across the country, Geo TV reported on Sunday. The water in both Tarbela and Mangla dams has dropped to dead levels, causing the shortfall, the channel quoted PEPCO officials as saying. The electricity demand had shot up after an increase in the use of air conditioners...

Ah, load shedding.

We lived in Guam for a couple of years in the early 90’s. The island was making the difficult transition from a 50 year old Navy-run power grid to a public utility and a growing tourist hotel presence on the island. Regularly scheduled blackouts were a fact of life. We learned to put up with them with the help of kerosene lanterns swung from hooks on the walls in case of earthquakes. We weren’t missing much in the way of TV back then anyway. There was that one stretch of outages by which we knew the wristwatch on the guy running the grid was running exactly seven minutes late. And while my very pregnant better half sometimes bristled at the loss of air conditioning twice a day, I quite liked the night-time blackouts that revealed a carpet of stars stretching from one horizon to the other, and bright blue phosphorescence on the reefs.

Anywho, one Pakistani doctor suggests their current power situation is the path to religious, military, political, and economic salvation:

Then there are my dear and good friends who keep pointing out that if only we as a nation revert to the true Sunnah, all our problems would be solved almost immediately. During periods of load shedding my mind does indeed turn to such admonishments.

More importantly, the only major advances in Muslim history, scientific, cultural and political, occurred before electricity was discovered. The Mughals, the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Ommayyads in Spain, the Fatimids in Egypt all brought great glory to Islam without a car, a motorbike, a split air-conditioner or a cell phone in sight.

Therefor I am convinced, especially during periods of load-shedding that our new and popularly elected government wants us, the people of the Islamic Republic, to revert to our greatness by recreating the environment in which Muslims excelled and built rich and thriving empires. In this connection I have a few suggestions that are offered in the true humility of my faith...

Heh. And this bit was great:

Also, the Islamic Republic will literally have no ‘carbon footprint’ since there will be virtually no production of ‘green-house’ gases except those produced in a biological fashion or in the industrial enclaves.

Therefore we can sell our carbon units to our neighbours to the east and the north. And if there are no airplanes, no cell phones and no ‘pillion riding’, then as a country we can demand a lot of money from our benefactors in the West. They all know what those three can lead to!

Hmmmmmm. Load shedding as a U.S. political platform? Nah - we’re way too impure for that.

[Don’s other habitat is www.evangelicalecologist.com]

The story of the Deutsche Bank building following the NYC 9/11 attacks is a study in bureaucratic incompetence...but more importantly it’s an ongoing experience in human tragedy and loss.

There’s a great deal to sort out. This piece, “The tombstone at Ground Zero,” does a good job introducing the issues.

The article begins with an introduction into the fire at the building site in August of last year:

...Thick black smoke was pouring out of the shell of what used to be the Deutsche Bank building. The structure had been badly damaged in the terrorist attack when portions of the collapsing south tower dug a 15-story gash and propelled toxic dust into it. Six years later the bank building was finally being taken down.

The fire quickly spread to 13 floors. The 100 firefighters inside the building couldn’t douse the flames because, as would become clear later, the basement standpipe that should have supplied water to the floors above had been disconnected. The scene was chaotic. Firefighters couldn’t see through the dense smoke and found their retreat blocked by a mazelike series of plywood walls and polyethylene sheeting that made it nearly impossible to locate exits. Panic was audible in the voices on the firefighters’ radios.

Eventually some 275 firemen used ropes to hoist hoses up the scaffolding on the building and tamed the seven-alarm conflagration around 10:30 that night, seven hours after the blaze began. But the struggle to extinguish the flames had cost two lives. Firefighters Robert Beddia, 53, and Joseph Graffagnino, 33, were found lying on the 14th floor near a hose line and pronounced dead at a local hospital. The cause: smoke inhalation.

Here’s a picture of the building when it was on fire: