Seattlest Pix 09Nov22
Manifold Motion's Miscellenea II Wraps Up Tonight
Around The -Ists This Week
Seattlest Pix 09Nov23
Can't Miss It: Monday
It's been business as usual since the day after the storm in some Seattle neighborhoods. We eat, we drink, we Christmas shop, we gather all the shingles from the street and life goes on. Meanwhile, the Eastside continues to live red in tooth and claw. It's still mostly dark over there and crowds await Mel Gibson's next gasoline delivery at each service station. Hopefully it'll drive home how much energy it takes to power a 4000 square foot mcmansion full of today's technological wonders when someone's got to wait in line for gasoline to feed the generators. Hey, Eastside, maybe if you didn't try to cheap out of your property taxes by living near the city instead of inside of it you wouldn't be in this mess right now. Something you might want to think about next time the socialist tax collector comes around.
The other dark place on our map is south Seattle (or at least it was the last place to light up), and, unfortunately, this one's on us. Remember when we all wagged our shaming fingers at New Orleans when Katrina swallowed the Lower Ninth? See how it's the black people who bear the brunt of natural disaster in the United States, we said. Well, not here, because we're progressive and enlightened and whoops- Check out the map. Seattle City Light doesn't have it up any more, but the last snapshot of the outage map we got (Saturday) shows lily white light emitting from the homes, bars and cafes of north Seattle while down south where our "foreign born" reside the power remained out.
Of course, in the case of Bellevue you can't blame their electrical shortcomings on property taxes - The Eastside isn't served by a Public Utility District. They have a privatized version called Puget Sound Energy. Somehow their sinsSUVs must still be responsible, though.
And in Seattle, the Stranger beat us to the punch blaming racism for the prolonged outages in south Seattle. Sure, sure, Seattle City Light is busting ass and there's no way an order came down to make sure white people had power as soon as possible. The storm must have hit harder down there, or the infrastructure in the south of the city was more wind-prone, but still, look at the map.
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Can we get rise above the level of hackneyed stereotypes? Yes, it's fun to slam the Eastside for being the home of giant SUV's and huge houses, but the fact is there are far more people living in modest homes working average jobs and trying to provide a decent life for their families. And there are tens of thousands of immigrant families doing the same.
But it's so much easier to sit smugly in your little Capitol Hill apartment eating takeout Thai food and spewing generalizations. When are you going to grow up?
Just thinking (as I sit in my toasty downtown studio) that George Bush is up there in Air Force One, watching our meltdown. (What do you mean, he's not?) Without power, those McMansions can't even open gates & garage doors to unleash their Hummers.
That orange spec in North Seattle: Sir Mix-a-Lot's house.
Maybe you want to play the race card, but I know for a fact that there were areas north and south that didn't have power for some time.
Who is responsible for Mercer Island? They didn't have power most of the weekend, and still might not ...
I happen to live in Bellevue (which contrary to your writing is a City) and was fortunate to have power throughout, but many people here and elsewhere were not as lucky. Contrary to popular belief, I can attest to the fact that not everyone in Bellevue lives in a mansion, has electric gates or drives a hummer or suv (although all of those would be cool ...).
Speaking of smug Capitol Hill, there are two large trees across 14th Ave E, one at Roy, another at East Thomas, and then one more south of East John on 13 Ave E. Other than someone wrapping them with Do Not Cross tape, nothing has happened to them. The one at East Thomas is still wrapped in the power lines it brought down.
You'd think with this firewood shortage, someone with a pickup and a chainsaw would be in business right now.
Um you forgot smug Queen Anne. We had power Friday night suckers.
This whole blog post belongs in the "Ask an Uptight Seattleite" feature of The Seattle Weeekly.
Um, sure most of S. Seattle went longer without power, but if you look at that map, it also shows most of the neighborhoods bordering L. WA: Madison Park, Madrona, Leschi, plus Mt. Baker, Lakewood, etc., were dark at the same time.
Given that most of these areas are known to include some of the tonnier, if not just plain most expensive real-estate in the City, I'd have to say this suggestion of some sort of "conspiracy against the poor" being perpetrated by SCL is just bull-puckey.
In looking at this map, I'd have to say that geography would seem to be playing a more pertinent role in the speed of power restoration than race or socio-economic position; these are some of the hilliest areas in Seattle, with less-than-square surface street grids, and lots and lots of greenbelt to boot. The roads are more twisty-windy in a lot of these neighborhoods, particularly closer to the Lake and the Sound, and most likely there are more downfalls as well, making finding and repairing downed lines much more problematic than on relatively flat, more evenly laid-out street grids found in many other locations throughout the city.
The wealthiest Eastside residents are the most likely to be able to check into a hotel or find other comfortable accommodations until the power returns. It's the working and middle class citizens of the Eastside, not the property tax evaders, who are likely suffering the most from this outage.
I think we can all agree on this: for whatever reason, it takes a lot longer to restore power to South Seattle than North Seattle. Why?
Windy streets? Maybe, but there are plenty of those in Sand Point and in North Ballard, and all of these have power.
Hills? Magnolia, Queen Anne, Capitol Hill and Crown Hill are fine.
I think it's pretty obvious that there's some sort of infrastructure problem in the South end, and no matter what the cost, it ought to be fixed. I'm happy to pay a little more on my light bill so everyone in the city can rely on their utilities.
I'm suspicious of the race issue being both true and universally true in US cities. Over the summer, there was a blackout in Queens that lasted the better part of a week. Astoria, being the closest part of Queens to Manhattan, definitely had power back first (about three days later), while the largely Hispanic neighborhood of Woodside was out for five days. Believe me, I was not the first to grumble that the power would've been on the same day if the Upper West Side had been affected instead.
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My magnolia apartment was dark thursday through late saturday night.Sorry, but you don't get to mock the rich for having the power out in their mansions, then complain about how the power outage unfairly targets the poor in the same post. Then again, I guess you do, since you just did.
Say what you will about institutional racism and so on in terms of people getting power back on. I really don't have too much of an opinion about it, other than probably just long term neglect in poorer neighborhoods is to blame. Classism ALWAYS trumps racism, though they often go together.
However, please note that West Seattle's hospital, according to Seattle Power's hotline, was the last hospital to regain power. Which is obviously ridiculous. Hospitals should have been up immediately, and the fact that the one hospital that wasn't was in an area that (other than Alki) is largely poor, not white, and has more non-English speakers than the rest of the city.
It's day 5, and I have no power. I live on a home on Capitol Hill, and believe me, I'm anything but smug right now.
We lived in the house for two nights without heat because I called 17 hotels and none had a single room available. None. We stayed warm by using every blanket we had, and taking hot baths heated with water on the stove (luckily, we could light the gas stove by hand).
When we finally got into a hotel Sunday night, the staff told us about how many people had been awful--trying to bribe them for a room, etc. The people at the hotel were also working round the clock, and seemed exhausted.
All around us, people were christmas shopping, going out for drinks, just generally not seeming to give a crap that large sections of the city--or in our case, just one darkened street--were having some of the worst experiences of our lives: cold, in the dark (literally), and just really freaked out.
The whole idea that any one section is targeted or not is not just clueless, typical-Seattle discussion to have, and the reason that blogs are often just a big, fat waste of time.
We spent the weekend hiding out and trying to stay warm at various libraries and coffeeshops. Instead of taking the time to write up this absurd entry into a blog that's done a crap job of covering this storm and its consequences, why don't you just unplug already?
And if you're at a coffeeshop when the next power outage happens, stay home and give your outlets to us, so we can recharge our cell phones and get in contact all of our friends and family. You're in the way.
What do you mean Knee-Jerk Liberal Reaction? I have seen more SUVs and Volvos on the Eastside with “Impeach Bush” bumper stickers than anywhere on the countryside. It is the redneck, male, chauvinist, conservative pigs in rubber boots who are busting their hid-side to restore power to the city that is full of wining rich liberals huddling around scented candles…
As someone else already pointed out, Madison Park and other mansion-heavy areas are also without power.
On the other hand, I kind of KNEW this would happen. When the lights went out, I remember thinking "And White Center/Rainier Valley will be the last to get the power back".
Then again, I drove home from Renton through Ranier Valley during the storm, and there was some very serious flooding. So maybe that has something to do with it?