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July 28, 2010

Readers' Forum: July 29, 2010

Anonymous ---- The Tribune Star Wed Jul 28, 2010, 09:46 PM EDT

Storm sheds light on how things are supposed to work

The storm July 17 was a doozy, short-lived but intense. At the peak of the lashing rain came a burst of light through the kitchen window followed instantaneously by the sound of a sharp crack, not too loud, then total darkness and nothing audible but the rain slapping windows and vinyl siding.

I fumbled for a flashlight. Right where I left it. After a while, one knows the house, even in abject darkness.

The electricity was off. I waited for the clocks to start blinking and ate by lamplight.

After about an hour, I noticed the blue and red lights flashing through the living room curtains. I pulled them aside. The police cruiser sat in the middle of the intersection at the corner, its emergency beacons alight. In the pulsing flashes, I could make out tree limbs across them. The driving rain continued, frantic not to end just yet.

“They won’t fix that tonight,” I surmised and went to bed. The crew from Duke Energy showed up Sunday morning. “Probably just looking for an excuse to log some overtime,” I sniggered. “There goes another spike in our utility bills again.”

The police cruiser has been transmogrified by the sorcery of dawn into a set of bright yellow wooded barricades. Storms can end magically that way, don’t you know?

By 11:30 a.m., about 12 hours after the lightning strike, electricity was restored to the homes in our neighborhood. No thawed-out freezers full of food to have to be thrown out. No elderly or people in poor health suffering heat strokes to be rushed in to medical practitioners for saving. Nuisance, yes. But calamity avoided.

The police and street departments, representing the nanny state, protected the public interest, as well they should, until further help could arrive. God bless ’em. And thank goodness there are still enough tax dollars out there to pay their wages as the need arises. (But for how much longer?)

The power company employees, harried and exhausted as they must be by the recent spate of tumultuous weather, had things up and running again as soon as could reasonably be expected. Hooray for the private sector!

Isn’t this the way it’s supposed to work, this economy of ours? The public and private sectors partnering to get things done?

Maybe that’s what we need to kick-start the economy … a great big old-fashioned emergency. A natural catastrophe? Another war? God forbid (on both counts).

Or, maybe we could just pretend it was a big ol’ dastardly emergency. Call it an energy crisis or something.

We could build a bunch of turbines, perhaps, maybe even bring some manufacturing jobs to Indiana.

Or am I just tilting at windmills again? I wonder how much oil a corn cob could absorb?

— Clay Wilkinson

Terre Haute

Thanks for setting Byrd record straight

This is to thank Neal J. Ganly for his letter reminding us of now-deceased Sen. Robert Byrd’s true track record: His leadership role in the Ku Klux Klan, voting record against Civil Rights legislation, his excessive earmarks for West Virginia, and the fact that he was still occupying a seat in the U.S. Senate at 92, long past the time when he could be effective.

It was hard to “swallow” all the kudos at his death for those of us who remembered. I appreciate Mr. Ganly’s setting the record straight.

— Char Minnette

Terre Haute

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