October 16, 2020
Dear Everyone:
We are, once again, living under the whimsical
hammer of “Public Safety Power Shutoff” or PSPS.
This is the ongoing threat of the local utility, “Piracy, Greed &
Extortion”, also known as PG&E, to shut the power off at will in various
parts of the state of California.
This occurs when weather conditions cause warm,
dry air, combined with predictions of higher-than-“normal” winds, to
lead to wildfires. In the
past, many of these fires were (pardon the pun) sparked by PG&E’s
electricity lines connecting with dry tree branches.
To ensure against this inevitable outcome, PG&E
instigated PSPS. In effect,
they shut all the power off for large swaths of the state.
Their argument was that, if they had little idea where the fires
might begin, they should plunge everyone into darkness “just in case”.
This resulted in general condemnation and much
grinding of teeth, among other things.
After that, PG&E reduced the magnitude of their shutoffs, but
continue to hold the threat over everyone.
You might think that PG&E would make attempts
to curtail this activity by trimming trees away from the electrical
lines, or better yet not hang their lines so close to trees.
But this would require thinking ahead by the Powers That Be at
PG&E.
That, clearly, is asking too much.
Instead, PG&E is falling back on the tried-and-true approach that
worked so well when the utility sort-of-accidentally blew up part of San
Bruno about ten years ago:
They placed the blame squarely on their own failure to manage their
records properly.
In other words, they can’t make sure that tree
limbs are removed around electric lines because they can’t find the
records that indicate when they had done such work in the past.
Obviously, “poor records management” was the culprit.
After the San Bruno incident, PG&E convinced
the courts that the utility would amend its ways.
They even set up a recruitment booth at the ARMA International
Conferences for several years.
(Of course, there is no need for me to remind anyone that ARMA
stands for Association of Records Managers and Administrators.)
They also aggressively recruited records and information
management (RIM) people who were being thrown out of work by companies
like Chevron.
That lasted a few years, then PG&E quietly
dumped all the records management people to save on costs.
When PG&E was censured again for many of the recent wildfires in
California, they again dragged out the scapegoat known as “poor records
management”. After all, it
worked before, didn’t it?
The governor of California, Gavin Newsom,
accused the utility of “greed and mismanagement”, which is rather like
saying “night follows day”.
In the meantime, PG&E is calling on everyone to conserve energy, which
has nothing to do with the velocity of local winds, by turning off their
air conditioning until after 10:00 pm.
At this moment, the thermometer hanging out on my patio is
registering about 90 degrees.
I’ll turn my air conditioning off when the
current CEO of PG&E, who is pulling in twice the base salary of his
unlamented predecessor, gets down on his knees and begs my forgiveness
for maligning Records and Information Management.
At this moment, he’s hanging in effigy, right next to the
thermometer out on the patio.
Until a “high wind” blows him down.
Then I’ll use his effigy as a voodoo doll.
Love, as always,
Pete
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