Every winter, the power goes out at my parents' house for at least three days. Sometimes the failure makes some kind of sense – maybe it's really windy out and a branch falls on a line – but more often it seems to come completely out of nowhere, as though someone threw a bottle and an insult at a substation and it just got sulky. Explanations vary for specific outages, but I did recently discover that there are several factors contributing to the overall jankiness of the system. I write about them not because I consider the inner workings of Puget Sound Energy particularly fascinating, but because the whole story is so ridiculously revealing of what my hometown is all about.
I've been meaning to write about Bainbridge Island – the small town where I spent the formative years of my rather malformed youth – for some time. It's a crazy place, and a discussion of it opens up all variety of worm-cans: class, racism, political correctness, the general idea of the soul of a place and what that concept really means (and doesn't mean). I am not an impartial observer. I hated growing up here in a totally unconsidered, gut-based way, and I still loathe it upon my return every Christmas. For my own edification, I need to figure out why. This essay is the first in what will become a series exploring the culture of Bainbridge Island; I am here introducing you to the town through this story of PSE and the various parties that have been cockblocking it for decades.
The energy company wants to update the system and install new substations to accommodate the growing population. They have been wanting to do this for a long time. However, every time they have a town meeting to discuss their proposed improvements, a small group of people who apparently have nothing better to do (like, say, work really hard) shows up and raises the same three objections. In most places, their objections would be duly noted and then promptly ignored – after all, the half-baked complaints of a small group are less important than the town-wide need for reliable electricity – but somehow on Bainbridge things are different. They are different because people are rich. I don’t know exactly how the politics operate here, but I do know that the ability of this small collective to effectively fight the power company has to do with their money (which equals influence, equals power… I've never had enough of any of these to know how the equation operates, but the math seems to work whether I understand it or not). These people show up and they raise the following objections:
1. Power lines and substations are ugly. This is the same reason that the island has such crappy cell coverage: no one wants to have to look at a cell tower. No one wants to have to look at a bunch of wires. They want power, they want reception, but the sacrifice of an unobstructed trees-and-water view is too great. People move here from the city because it's so pretty, so naturey, so untainted (to the eye, in any event). If we wanted to look at metal shit and not trees, we would have just stayed in the city, right?
2. We wouldn’t have to build all these ugly substations if everyone would just conserve. Bainbridge is the most self-consciously "green" (jesus god I hate that adjective) place I have ever seen. Green-itude will become an essay in itself later, but I do want to point out here the basic hypocrisy of this argument. The people saying these things by in large live in huge houses with big, beautiful, uninsulated picture windows, and green, sprawling, water-intensive lawns, yet they're urging everyone to conscientiously conserve their electricity so that we don’t have to spoil the view – and, of course, because conserving is just the right thing to do. This fashionable environmentalism is one of the things that bothers me most about this town.
3. The electromagnetic radiation given off by power lines and substations is harmful. The problem with this argument is that it isn’t true. Scientists have been investigating the issue for decades, and no persuasive evidence has been found to support the claim that this type of electromagnetic radiation is bad for you. As far as I can tell, people believe this falsehood because "electromagnetic radiation" contains the word "radiation," which is a really scary word, because we all know about Chernobyl, right? What no one seems to bother learning is that the electromagnetic radiation given off by power lines is not harmful, because its frequency is too low to ionize atoms. Non-ionizing radiation is safe because the ionization of your body's atoms is what causes the damage. This is not a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of scientific ignorance.
Ignorance is one thing, but once you combine it with money and power you start entering dangerous territory. These are the three reasons that emergency shelters have to be set up in local churches every winter to warm those who can't afford to install generators (and those who can afford them do): power lines are ugly, sustainability sounds good, and I think that radiation is probably icky. The egos involved here are mind-boggling – thinking that you're more qualified to speak on the power system than the damn power company is? And having enough influence to make your ignorant voice not only heard, but obeyed? Who are these people, and why don’t they have anything else to worry about?
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