Both decisions could collectively cost customers more than $3 billion in the next three years and are being closely watched… The first issue regulators will decide is a rule that implements a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis this year that will allow utility companies such as Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy and Tampa Electric to charge customers so they can bury power lines in order to reduce storm-related outages in the future.
I wonder if the folks who opposed the Tallahassee Tyrant’s spending initiative on electric grid hardening and undergrounding are still opposed!
Separately, do we have a final verdict on the restoration of public services in Florida by Team DeSantis? Aside from repairs to and/or replacement of individual structures, what’s left to be done?
Today is the anniversary of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, in which King George III told the white settlers in the colonies that they couldn’t steal any more land from the Native Americans. Our Founding Fathers owned a lot of land to the west of the Proclamation Line and, therefore, had a huge financial incentive to secede from Great Britain.
A righteous American will typically admit that the land he/she/ze/they is using was stolen. Here’s an example from the principal of the Lincoln, Maskachusetts 5-8 school:
This morning we had an all school meeting. I began with a land acknowledgement that we are sitting on land that belonged to the Wampanoag Nation and that was forcibly taken.
Note that she does not offer to give the land back to the Wampanoags, who are alive and kicking, and then pay them rent for its continued use. The “land acknowledgement” is sufficient.
What if empty words aren’t sufficient? Where can a person live in the modern United States without being on land that was stolen? South Florida! According The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, the Native Americans never lived in most of South Florida for the simple reason that most of South Florida was a “river of grass” as Marjory Stoneman Douglas put it. Not even a Native American is in sufficient harmony with Nature to live in the middle of a river. When the Spanish arrived, there were some Calusa living on the coast of Southwest Florida, but they hadn’t figured out how to drain the swamp and build condos on it. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach megalopolis is nearly all on “reclaimed” land. What about the Seminoles?
IN MODERN SOUTH FLORIDA, where just about everyone comes from somewhere else, it turns out that even the Native Americans are out-of-state transplants. Today, the Seminole Indians and their Miccosukee relatives are known as the people of the Everglades. But they didn’t start out anywhere near there. They were driven there. Seminoles began streaming into north Florida from Georgia and Alabama during the eighteenth century, just as the Calusa were dying out. They had little in common with the Calusa. They were known as cimarrones—“breakaways,” or “wild ones”—because most of them split off from the Creek Confederation, and they retained their Creek traditions, worshipping the Breathmaker at annual Green Corn harvest ceremonies. They were farmers and traders as well as hunters and fishermen; they were also some of America’s first cowboys. They visited the Everglades to hunt, but by 1800, their permanent villages only stretched as far south as Tampa Bay. When a Seminole chief issued his famous vow to remain in Florida—“Here our navel strings were first cut, and the blood from them sunk into the earth, and made the country dear to us”—he meant north Florida.
So… any American who is sincere about not wanting to be implicated in the great theft of land from the Native Americans by European migrants (this should not be confused with the scientifically disproved Great Replacement) should join us here in Palm Beach County! (Or, if not as boring as we are, in Miami)
At this time, Florida Power and Light (FPL) has restored power to more than 45% of their accounts in Lee County, while LCEC has only restored power to 9% of their accounts (18,000 out of 183,000 customers).
Florida Power and Light is the Evil Empire of Electricity in Florida, a for-profit regulated monopoly.
LCEC is one of more than 850 not-for-profit electric distribution cooperatives located throughout 46 states and serving 75 percent of land mass in the nation. Cooperatives are in business to serve members at the cost of service. This business model is different from investor-owned utilities, which typically share profits with investors globally.
It seems as though the profit-seekers invested substantially more in resiliency than the non-profit folks.
Sunday morning: LCEC had 177,105 out of 199,097 customers tracked (11 percent on; note the inconsistency in total Lee County customers with the 183,000 figure above).
FPL had 132,930 out from among 288,630 in Lee County (54 percent on).
On Monday morning, the outage site still showed roughly the same number out: 177,369 out of 199,097 in Lee County. Either LCEC made no progress at all in 24 hours or we are seeing #FakeNews on the poweroutage.us site (someone’s computer system is broken?). Over the same roughly 24-hour period, FPL had reduced its Lee County outages from 132,930 to 100,220. I checked Twitter and found the following update from LCEC:
The power outage site shows 184,751 LCEC customers out across all locations.
https://poweroutage.us/area/state/puerto%20rico (a fair number of our Latinx brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in the American part of Latinx America remain without power after the September 18 impact of Hurricane Fiona)
Most of my friends are from the Northeast or California. As such, they’ve been near the maximum panic level for coronapanic since March 2020. Knowing that we’d moved to southeast Florida, these folks contacted us to make sure that a hurricane in southwest Florida hadn’t destroyed our house and killed us. The ensuing phone, email, and text conversations provided a good window into how those who are most fearful of COVID-19 (and most supportive of lockdowns, school closures, forced vaccinations, and forced masking) process news about an unfortunate event.
Let’s start with the official newspaper of the coronapanicked. The New York Times ran stories with “Fort Myers, Fla.” in the dateline, implying that the article was about the mainland city. The photos, however, showed politically distinct towns on barrier islands, such as Fort Myers Beach. They also showed the damaged causeway to Sanibel, another barrier island. Next to some text about damage to houses, the newspaper ran photos of wrecked mobile homes (i.e., trailers) in trailer parks. A lady who has lived in Florida for 50 years said “Why do you think they call them barrier islands?” Example from the NYT combining these two methods:
On Friday afternoon (September 30), a Manhattan-based friend wrote to me about the destruction of Orlando by floods. He had seen it on TV so it must be real. I pointed out that MCO was receiving commercial airline flights, that people were getting off those airliners into rental cars and driving the rental cars to Disney (all four parks were open on Friday, September 30), Universal (park opened evening of September 30), and Sea World (opened Saturday, October 1). The awesome Dezerland was open. All of these places had electric power. Maybe there were a few neighborhoods in Orlando, whose metro population is 2.5 million, that remained flooded, but if the airport and all of the theme parks were opened, did that qualify as catastrophic damage?
Another Manhattan-based mask Karen posted on Twitter about “hundreds” of Floridians having died from Hurricane Ian. That sounds bad, but more than 3,000 out of the 22 million Floridians die each year in car accidents and, in fact, some of the deaths attributed to Hurricane Ian are actually car accidents. Our Karen had never been motivated to express any concern about these deaths and how to reduce them (see my pet idea!). A day after he posted about “hundreds” of deaths, the official tally was in the 20s and ABC was estimating in the 30s. (i.e., more people are killed by car accidents every week in Florida than the number of confirmed deaths from this hurricane) It is sad when people die directly or indirectly from a hurricane, of course, but obesity kills more Americans every day than all hurricanes put together kill in a year.
(This raises the ghoulish question of whether Hurricane Ian might actually reduce the number of deaths among Floridians for 2022. When roads are closed and things are shut down, people don’t drive as much. This cuts into the traffic accident rate and might cut car-related deaths by more than the number killed by the hurricane. A similar phenomenon was observed when the U.S. military went to Saudi Arabia before our first Gulf War. Despite some soldiers killed in combat, lives in the military were saved overall compared to if we hadn’t fought the war. Soldiers couldn’t drink and had almost nowhere to drive, so deaths by car accident were cut almost to zero.)
Our neighbors, most of whom are physicians with low levels of coronapanic, considered the media coverage fake news. “You know that they’re lying to you when you keep seeing the same damaged house from different angles,” was one observation. One neighbor is sheltering a refugee from Fort Myers. As with my friend’s dad, her house was undamaged, but she drove across the state to our sanctuary neighborhood in order to enjoy the luxuries of electric power and Internet.
David Hogg, the survivor-turned-activist, implied that “half” of Florida has been destroyed and will need to be rebuilt:
Republicans hate big government until big government needs to rebuild half your state.
Side-effects are kicking in but very much still worth it and 10000x better than Covid It’s like a minor cold with chills, body aches, a slight headache, sore arm.
Has “half” of Florida truly been destroyed? Here’s NOAA’s map of where the agency thinks Hurricane Ian did significant damage. The photos were taken on Thursday, a day after the hurricane.
The NOAA imagery shows that the destruction of Fort Myers Beach might not be complete. Here’s a typical part of the barrier island that is not a trailer park:
There is a lot of debris, but nearly all of the houses appear to be standing. Here’s what it looked like before (from Google Maps):
A friend lives in an oceanfront condo in Naples. I checked in with her today. Consistent with Vice President Kamala Harris’s point that “communities of color” were “most impacted” by Hurricane Ian, houses and buildings close to the water in Naples were flooded. My friend’s building has a sacrificial ground level lobby and it was dramatically sacrificed, complete with car pushed into the lobby:
Car dealers became billionaires thanks to coronapanic. Will they get an extra few $billion in profit in Florida given that cars have been destroyed during a moment when each new car is sold for $6,000 or $15,000 in profit? (the MSRP-invoice spread plus the market adjustment markup)
My friend evacuated to a house that is 2 miles inland. Neither her condo nor the evacuation destination were damaged, but neither has power or Internet. One guy actually elected to stay in the condo building, despite the mandatory evacuation order, and came through the storm without injury. Restaurants and supermarkets are open.
If you get hungry while you’re in Naples, the Supermarket of the Deplorables reopened just one day after the storm, 9/29. Here are some November 2021 photos from Seed to Table:
The Google says that it is less than a one-hour drive from the Naples Airport to downtown Fort Myers, which is near where the hardest-hit communities of color on barriers islands are (Sanibel, Captiva, and Fort Myers Beach).
How’s Team DeSantis doing with the overall recovery effort? Here’s today’s New York Times:
The top stories are the horrors likely to be visited on the nation by improperly appointed Supreme Court justices, “relatable lesbian content”, a soccer stampede in which more people died than were killed by Hurricane Ian, and journalist Ezra Klein’s dream that someone other than himself be stuck with the bill for our enormous government (“a tax that could help with inflation” that will fall on “the rich”).
Nothing about the Tyrant of Tallahassee or the situation in Florida after what the same newspaper previously characterized as a catastrophe. Should we infer that Ron DeSantis therefore has not made any missteps?
Update, 8:30 pm: the New York Times front page now has an article about Florida, but it is about migrants being welcomed in Maskachusetts (top left), not about the recent Category 4 hurricane or Ron DeSantis’s restoration effort. Also… bean soup.
The governor of the state in which the disaster occurs must declare a state of emergency and formally request from the President that FEMA and the federal government respond to the disaster.
That’s already happened. So now some of this already-paid-by-you and already-appropriated-by-Congress money will be spent to address the damage caused by Hurricane Ian.
Suppose that you want to do more. My favorite way to help a place that has suffered is to buy stuff from or in that place. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, for example, I bought a bunch of Japanese-made products, including Shun knives. SW Florida isn’t renowned for manufacturing, but you could plan a vacation there! Marco Island is pretty awesome and the monster concrete hotels should be fine after the power is restored. Even if you visit the theme parks in Orlando you will be helping keep the state’s economy vibrant.
Don’t need to learn sexual orientation and gender identity at Disney World or be frightened to death at Universal? You can donate money. But to whom? Charlie Crist, the Democrat who says that he will deliver Floridians from fascism, and Ron DeSantis, the hated fascist himself (he and Giorgia Meloni will get together and shave each other’s heads, get scalp tattoos, and burn synagogues?), agree that the best place for donating money is the Florida Disaster Fund, run by VolunteerFlorida. This enterprise earns a 100/100 rating from Charity Navigator (compare to 89 for the American Red Cross):
The default is a modest $10. Casey DeSantis explains at about 18:30 into the video below that more than $10 million has been raised. Some of the cited big donors: Amazon, Walmart, Publix, Florida Power & Light, the PGA Tour. The credit card fees are being waived when you donate so nearly all of the money should go to work.
One caveat is that you don’t get public credit, even your name on a list of donors, if you donate a modest amount. You get a web page thank-you:
So unless you can brag on Facebook or Twitter or a personal blog, giving will have to be its own reward. If you’re a Democrat make sure to take a screen capture of this because you won’t want to keep the email acknowledgment and there is some chance that your itemized deductions will be more than the generous Trump-established standard deduction. Alternatively, you could be like Elvis Presley and not try to write off the deduction “because it takes away from the spirit of the gift.”
Why would Democrats not welcome the email acknowledgment of the gift? “Your donation plays a key role in supporting Governor DeSantis’ initiatives…”
Florida is staged and ready with: ⁃ 42,000 linemen ⁃ 5,000 Florida Guardsmen ⁃ 5 USAR teams – 1,200 DOT personnel ⁃ 250 aircraft and more than 1600 high water vehicles and 300 boats.
Considering that they couldn’t start driving into the affected areas until the hurricane eye had moved well northeast, the 42,000 linemen, linewomen, and line-non-binary-people have had essentially one full day to work. How much have they accomplished? Florida started off with at least 2.7 million customers (about 5 million people when you consider household size and subtract businesses?) without power according to poweroutage.us. A state agency published a similar number:
Can he win an Emmy for these or is he not as good as Andrew Cuomo? (I never had the privilege to see Cuomo’s Emmy-winning briefings.)
Finally, how about making a documentary film of these linemen, linewomen, and line-non-binary-people restoring Florida’s grid? So as not to delay their important work, have a 27-year-old interview them during meal breaks and ask, with outstretched palm, “Biden is going to force you to pay for most of my gender studies degree, but would you mind voluntarily kicking in for the rest?” Generally speaking, linepeople learn via a paid on-the-job apprenticeship rather than by sitting in a classroom. However, if we can find a few among the 42,000 who did complete a college degree, that would be even better for our video. A lineperson could explain how his/her/zir/their Critical Race Theory major and Gender Studies minor were invaluable prep for working on the 50 kV lines. Another could explain how the psych degree was helpful when configuring a Toshiba GRT200 transformer protection relay.
It’s amusing to watch the media’s approach to the hurricane and Ron DeSantis. They pretty much have to put him on TV, discussing plans to evacuate, etc. But the contrast with this young, vibrant, competent governor speaking extemporaneously versus the decrepit old fossil in Washington squinting his eyes to read what somebody else put on the teleprompter must be driving them nuts.
Assuming that DeSantis is continuing to demonstrate competence and organization, the best way for the media to support Democrats would be to ignore him. This would be the flip side of featuring Andrew Cuomo during coronapanic so much that he won an Emmy and the hearts of Americans identifying as female (see “Hot for governor! Women confess they are developing ‘MAJOR crushes’ on Andrew Cuomo” and remember that, due to his masterful management of the virus, New York State had only 367 COVID-tagged deaths per 100,000, while Sweden’s radical “give the finger to the virus” policy resulted in a horrific 1,849 deaths (per million)).
At this point it is unclear that Ron DeSantis will be doing a lot of briefings. Maybe he is going to be busy managing the statewide response instead of getting in front of cameras. But if the DeSantis twitter feed fills up with briefings that aren’t shown on CNN, can we infer that CNN has its thumb on the scale?
Let’s compare to a recent press conference from Joe Biden:
Who wants to compare the two for cognitive function and apparent competence to manage? No fair if you’re a passionate Democrat or Republican! Maybe we should let the European readers judge.
How about the Democrat running to liberate Floridians from the hated tyrant? Here’s his Twitter profile this morning:
Without scrolling, it is all about fascism and abortion care, neither of which is going to de-flood Fort Myers and Naples.
Practicalities of evacuation from Florida’s west coast considered the possibilities open to my friend’s dad in Fort Myers. He’s in his 80s and elected to stay home. My memory of his neighborhood is that it is just across the street from a neighborhood of houses with docks (i.e., houses right at river level, which is to say sea level). Other than being on a barrier island, this is about as vulnerable to Hurricane Ian as it was possible to be.
I checked in with my friend this evening, now that the hurricane is mostly done with Fort Myers (I had previously offered to drive there and exfiltrate the dad and wanted to see if that was going to be the project for tomorrow.) It turns out that the experience was like a Hollywood movie. First the street filled with water. Then the yard filled with water. Then the garage filled with water to a depth of about 6″. The house is one step up from the garage and the water began to recede just before it reached the top of the step. The house was saved from flooding by literal inches.
The hero of our story did not have impact glass (slightly older house) and did not have the time/energy to put up the hurricane shutters. Nonetheless, none of the windows or big sliders were damaged.
That’s the good news! The bad news is that he has no power and, surprisingly, no tap water. Governor DeSantis has 42,000+ utility workers assembled to get the lights back on so we’ll see what happens on the power front.
I just got off the phone with @GovRonDeSantis and told him Alabama is committed to helping our friends in Florida. If they need it and we’ve got it, then we’re going to send it. All of us in Alabama are praying hard for the people of Florida and anyone in the storm’s path.
(Georgia is also in the path of wrath for Ian so it can’t be as liberal in offering assistance.)
Here’s a Sanibel photo from March 2022 when I last visited this family:
(The traffic on Sanibel is horrific and I’m hopeful that if the island gets a rebuild they will rethink the transportation infrastructure.)
Related:
While Ron DeSantis, the state and county workers, the 42,000 linemen, linewomen, and line-non-binary-people labor to get Naples and Fort Myers back after one of the strongest hurricanes ever to hit the United States, what’s President Biden doing? “Murphy will join Biden to raise money for Dem governor candidates in D.C. tonight” (NJ Globe): Gov. Phil Murphy is heading to Washington, D.C. this afternoon to join President Joe Biden at a fundraiser for the Democratic Governors Association. The event at an undisclosed private residence, will help fund key Democratic gubernatorial candidates across the U.S. [See Joe Biden’s full agenda below]
Depending on a family’s financial situation, evacuating away from a storm can be costly.
“Many modest- to low-income households simply don’t have the cash or credit,” said Joshua Behr, research professor at Old Dominion University, in a 2018 interview with NPR.
Behr emphasized that the poorest may often wait until the last minute to evacuate, resulting in little to no availability for affordable hotel rooms.
The tragedy of inequality yet again and the obvious remedy is an expansion of the government that funds NPR so that enhanced transferism can be implemented.
As discussed in Practicalities of evacuation from Florida’s west coast, however, all of the quoted material from the NPR article is a lie. The county-run shelters near Fort Myers are (1) free, (2) pet-friendly, (3) equipped with backup generators, (4) stocked with free food and water, and (5) accessible via free transportation (Uber or government-run; summon via taxpayer-funded Obamaphone or wait for the flood and the knock on the door from the public safety crews). A poor person would actually save money by going to the shelter because he/her/zir/their food would be paid for. (The information regarding hotel rooms is also a lie; plenty were available starting at about $60 per night as of the day before the storm made landfall.)
Aside from lack of funds, what other obstacles could a person face in getting to safety?
And while many emergency warnings and notices are now printed in both English and Spanish, there’s still a gap when for those who speak other languages.
More than 400,000 households in Florida speak Haitian as their primary shared language, according to the Census Bureau. Tens of thousands of Floridians speak Portuguese, French, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Arabic, German, Russian, Italian or another language as their primary shared language at home.
“While looking at an evacuation map at a county in Florida, I saw they have it in both English and Spanish and thought ‘OK, that’s great.’ But also there are people there who may not speak either language,” said Cuite.
Cuite says alongside the language barrier being an issue for people, there are also different levels of literacy to account for.
“Some people may not be able to read, which makes things like finding their evacuation zone a challenge,” she said.
NPR has previously informed us that low-skill immigrants make a country rich. Today, NPR informs us that a substantial number of migrants can’t speak English or Spanish, are illiterate in all languages, and live in households in which all members are illiterate in all languages. Putting these two together, we can infer that this Army of the Illiterate will boost what we are told is the world’s most advanced economy.
Our neighborhood came through the overnight thunderstorms, which Mindy the Crippler did not appreciate. The phone shrieked a couple of times with a tornado warning and the federal government’s advice to Floridians to take shelter in basements (the nearest of which is in Atlanta?). There was heavy rain at times and some branches had come down from the palm trees. The neighborhood teenagers played football on the green (I also removed my shirt and a nice young lady paid me $100 to put it back on).
There have been no power glitches so far and no wind gusts above about 30 mph.
