The L.A. blackout gave local bloggers a chance to get some midday exercise evacuating their buildings.

Citizen Smash, powered up in San Diego, has a roundup of realtime commentary and points us to J. Mahdi (no link): “With all the chaos, I thought Osama himself had personally flown a helicopter into the parking lot.”

BoiFrom Troy: “The bottom line from being on the ground is that today’s brief hour-and-a-half power outage was a cluster-f*ck.”

… but Mayor Sam says “First off, the citywide power outage that happened today rarely happens in LA. When we get outages, they are localized and almost always short in duration. Once in a while a bad storm will really mess things up and a small area could be without power for a few days, but that rarely happens. And considering the power was out citywide – it was back up in less than two hours. Fantastic. Had this happened in New York for example, the entire Eastern seaboard would be down for two days.”

(I’m an Edison customer and if I thought about it, would be surprised how few outages we have compared to where I have lived in Florida, Massachusetts, and Virginia).

And Matt Szabo puts today’s stupendous news in its place: “Few things are funnier than watching an inconvenience covered as a crisis … the Los Angeles Times has a message board on its home page for Angelenos to share their blackout experiences. There, you can read inspirational, first-hand accounts of heroism and fortitude as the Angeleno people endured the trying hour and a half …”

Szabo also illustrates how former FEMA head Michael Brown just can not be blamed for this.

We’re going to hold our nose and skim through Daily Kos this evening. We expect they’ll have their typically bulletproof case placing the blame where they want it to go. It’ll go something like this: it hit mostly-Democratic West LA. There is a Republican governor. There is a Republican president. Therefore, it is their fault. QED.

(for another example of this logic, see here)

—
H/t: Mike in Miami (“You heard it from me first. This power outage is all Bush’s fault. Where is FEMA?”)

Technorati Tags: Los Angeles, blackout

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2005 at 7:03 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under California Schemin'. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.