On July 8 there was an explosion at a power receiving station in Northridge, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California. Residents of the neighborhood reported that it shook the ground. Power was cut to allow firefighters to combat the resulting blaze, and at one point at least 140 thousand people were left without electricity, on a night of record heat.
In a perfect demonstration of the warped priorities of capitalism, a nursing home was left unable to power more than its emergency lights, and the resulting heat was so severe that the residents had to leave their rooms for their own safety. Exposure to heatwave conditions without some means of cooling has been known to be fatal in nursing homes. Thousands of working class families likely faced the spoilage of food in the absence of working refrigeration. Meanwhile, the Northridge fashion mall was lit up brightly, powered by its own generators, and heavily guarded against “looters.”
The transformer that exploded was at least 40 years old and in need of replacement. The immediate cause given was high volume of demand, unsurprising given the near record temperatures that day, but even the corporate media could not avoid the obvious conclusion, that the system is vulnerable to these predictable surges in demand due to aging infrastructure under ever increasing strain. While the immediate causes of such failures vary, many would not occur, and those that did occur would likely have far less serious consequences if a serious effort were made to modernize and improve our electrical infrastructure, but instead the approach has been to do only the bare minimum to maintain a system built over half a century ago.
The real question though, is why?
If even the corporate media can see the problem, if hundreds of thousands of people are inconvenienced and even in many cases endangered, why is it that at every level our government continues on this unsustainable course?
Two years ago, the Department of Water and Power reported that eight of 70 high-voltage transformers were already beyond their 50 year life expectancies, and called to update the power grid. Heat wave conditions in Los Angeles have been linked to power outages for a decade. In the largest city, in the largest and wealthiest state in the country, how can it be that this problem has not been solved?
It’s not as though the necessary resources don’t exist. It’s not as though the government is averse to spending or borrowing. The likely cost of the Olympics Los Angeles Mayor Gil Garcetti is so eager to host is likely to be several times what it would cost to modernize the power grid. It’s at times like this that we remember who “our” governments really work for, not “the people,” certainly not the working classes, but capitalism, the ruling class. The tens of billions of dollars that will likely be spent on the Olympics mean corporate profits. Billions for the power grid mean improvements in the lives of ordinary people. In the logic of capitalism the first counts for everything, the second doesn’t count at all.
