April 11, 2008
Morning Roundup: We Need More Lights Edition
Good morning, D.C. Did you get caught in the big power outage last night? Pepco had a large failure that meant a loss of power to 1,700 customers in Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights. We hope all of you made good use of that time to tell ghost stories and/or get lucky by candlelight.
Miller Case to Be Reviewed: City Administrator Dan Tangherlini has announced he's ordered a review of the Jeremy Miller case, calling both the response of EMS workers to the wrong address and the failure of the city to notify his next of kin inexcusable. The Post also dug up another similar case of a man who died at Howard University Hospital and was taken to the morgue, and it took two days of his daughter calling hospitals before she found out what had happened to him. Our tip for the weekend: try to avoid dying in the District.
Metro Wants More Police: The Examiner reports that Metro’s new transit police chief hopes to add 25 more police officers and three police sergeants in the hopes of pushing down a recent spike in crime in the system, and to improve Metro's ability to handle special events.
Briefly Noted: Buildings evacuated over Bethesda gas leak ... Former D.C. Madam escort an officer in the Navy ... National Harbor to host Cirque du Soleil.
This Day in DCist: One year ago we found out a lot of our friends are apparently making more money than we are, and two years ago we thought CVS drug stores were pretty jerky for locking their condoms up.
Photo by geraintwn
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how about instead of just trying to avoid dying in the district, you try to avoid getting ill in any way, shape, or form. i have no confidence these days that you'll be dealt with in a reasonable way. if i'm going to need a hospital trip, i hope it happens elsewhere...
If EMS is going to just let people die like dogs, they should at least have the decency to foot the bill for a Viking funeral. It's not like the Potomac can get any more polluted.
monkey: actually, viking funerals will probably clean up the potomac. burning wood creates carbon (ash) and carbon absorbs pollutants (except for vinyl chloride and a few others). man, i need a life...
aaaaand Pepco should start listening to Georgie James.
Good point, rob. Y'know, ancient people found their clothes got cleaner if they washed them at a certain spot in the river. You know why? Human sacrifices were once made on the hills above this river. Bodies burnt. Water speeded through the wood ashes to create lye. The lye combined with the melted fat of the bodies, till a thick white soapy discharge crept into the river. The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes. Like the first monkeys shot into space.
Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing.
The viking funeral idea also solves what will likely become a shortage of cemetery space in the District. DCist commenters. We're all about synergy.
Great song!
There was a power loss in the Dawson Terrace area of Arlington last night as well from about 9:30-10:15...missed 'Scrubs', but at least I got to see the new 'Office'
Plenty of tourist trade on the Ganges, come funeral season. This could be a big moneymaker for DC, and it couldn't be any less entertaining than Adams Morgan Day or Taste of DC. Imagine a fleet of pimped-out refrigerator boxes, doused in charcoal lighter fluid, and lighting up the night as they float towards the 14th Street Bridge. Instead of horned Viking helmets, our heroes would be clad in corduroy baseball caps and gold lamé church hats. Those things burn good.
I got through the blackout by going to the bar and drinking til the lights came back on. Sure enough, it worked.
Couldn't National Harbor afford Circe du Puree ("The $80 Circus!")? No matter, as long as they have clowns juggling flaming mice and pooping from the norovirus, I'm all over it like brown on dookie. Let's paint the town brown...with savings!
Hmm, I live between Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights and I didn't experience a power outage last night.
No outage at the northern end of Mount Pleasant, either. Of course, I was taking advantage of the warm weather by drinking copious amounts of wine on my deck, so it's entirely possible that I wouldn't have noticed either way.
(But I still stand by my assertion that the power didn't go out. There were no flashing clocks when I came back inside. Always a good clue, kind of like the canary in the coal mine. Or something.)
Power outage in the Courthouse area of Arlington, too. Assume they were related, but it seems awfully random.
Hey, did anyone catch that Twilight Zone episode last night, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street? on the SciFi Channel. My TiVo went dead because of a random power outage.
engineergirl, the traffic lights were blinking on 18th Street last night (near where Florida and U Street meet). It was down that in area, I know.
Viking shmiking. Plenty of nice unused cemetery space around DC.
Power was out on Vernon St and 18th St near U, but not on California or further up 18th it seemed.
@SoupySales: But aren't we Dominion, not Pepco, I'd imagine they'd have seperate grids.
I had power last night, no outages, in the middle of Columbia Heights.
Rukasu, at the end of the day it's all the same grid.
Weren't those blackouts in New York a few years ago caused by something going wrong in Ohio?
Its all one big grid. If one grid goes down, the electricity has to go somewhere, so it is common for another grid somewhere else go down because the extra electrons blow it out of commission. For example during the 1994 Northridge quake, the entire LA grid went down, and the surge of extra power was so great, it blew out grids all the way to Seattle.
So apparently the 2003 blackout covered WAY MORE than New York City. Who knew?
But it was Ohio's fault. Really, what isn't Ohio's fault?
Arlington has one of the worst power grids in the area. simply grew too quick.