This Week's Favourite Things! June 30th - July 6th, 2014

1.  This video with a message from Earl Nightingale


 
2. Electricity.  So nice to have after Hurricane - turned tropical storm Arthur, thanks to all the hardworking linespeople who worked to restore it.

3. Hurricane Arthur - so happy Arthur didn't smash up our place.  To be honest I didn't think it was that bad a storm by the time it reached us so the reason Arthur made my weekly list is I think he 'outed' Emera for its poor handling of Nova Scotia Power. 

I polled some people who have lived in the province much longer than me and consensus was 2 days of no power for this degree of weather seemed excessive.  We were surprised to lose power at all and thought maybe it'd be restored within a couple hours, not a couple of days.  Seems like poor customer service to get from a company that keeps cutting and outsourcing jobs while raising power rates and giving executives big pay hikes and returning profit to shareholders.   And storm season hasn't even begun!  We all agreed that with this level of service, if we took a direct hit from a real hurricane we'd be screwed so it's time to solar up.  If Emera keeps this up, at some point I wonder if a class action lawsuit for negligence is going to make sense. 

One of the most frustrating things about the weekend was the fact that it was incredibly difficult to get through to any humans at Nova Scotia Power.   We didn't have internet access because of our outage and our lack of smart phones, but  the internet site that had outage information somehow went down.  My pet theory as to why this happened is that the site was taken down by management because they realized that people might have seen how few crews were working and gotten upset at the company for being understaffed.   Why the phone lines were overwhelmed was another good question but most times I called I got a busy signal. I wanted to report a downed line I saw so when I finally got through at 1am I decided to see how long it would take to get through to a human.  About 1/2 an hour I think.  It shouldn't have been that hard for people to report downed lines. At least when I finally did get through the person I spoke to was in the province and not at a foreign call center.

I also wonder why this province's utility is owned by a private corporation in the first place.   I wish ownership would go back to the province, and that individual households were rewarded for selling power back to the grid via their own solar panels, windmills and micro-hydro systems.  This would create incentive for individuals to invest in these technologies and take the burden off the utility for getting itself off of foreign coal.  It would be nice if low interest loans were made readily available for individual investment in these things.  However, as my husband pointed out, with a private corporation like Emera this would mean they wouldn't have anything to 'sell' and charge us for, so really for them it makes more sense to build a big wood-fired electric generator to start munching up all the provinces forests to burn up into power so Nova Scotia can look like Easter Island and Emera executives and shareholders can profit.

I learned a lot about local politics from Hurricane Arthur yesterday when we drove into Bridgewater looking for food; it was interesting that the side of the street with Sobeys on it had power all day, while Loblaws-owned Superstore went without.  Esso and Petro-Can had no power, but it somehow miraculously reappeared at the Irving Station.  Hmmm.

4. Crony-Baloney.  New phrase I just thought up writing point #3.  Ah, I googled it.  I'm not the first person to think this phrase up.

5.  This awesome video of Dongdu International's (DDI) plans for Nova Scotia! I think things are about to get interesting here, I joked to a fellow "Come From Away" several months ago that if this province doesn't get its act together some mainland Chinese investors are likely to fly in and start buying up the whole show.   But I never anticipated this!!  DDI has also been buying up Detroit.  Not sure what that says about the province's economy... but having grown up in Richmond BC I'll be curious to see how this development impacts the province.  Hopefully the government will be smart enough to ensure that it is with maximum positive benefits for its current residents; both humans and wildlife.