A Tale Of Two Rolling Blackouts

Books By Patti Liszkay
​Available On Amazon

​​"Equal and Opposite Reactions" http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
and the sequel, "Hail Mary" https://www.amzn.com/1684334888
​Available on Amazon.

​A TALE OF TWO ROLLING BLACKOUTS

​       This past week has been a scorcher here in Columbus, Ohio. 
      It was hot on Monday, in the upper 80's. Then on Monday night a  thunder storm rolled in with pounding wind and rain, and the next day the temperature in Central Ohio soared into the high nineties. By late Tuesday afternoon, with the local power grid battered by the previous night's storm,

 ...and the  air conditioning cranked up citywide, there were electrical blackouts in residences and businesses throughout the greater Columbus area. 
​     However it was announced that the power blackouts across the area were in fact intentional: American Electric Power, the provider of electricity for Columbus and vicinity, had instituted rolling  outages around town to prevent the entire power gird from shutting down and making it even harder to restore electricity to Central Ohio.
​    So over the next three days as the heat lingered in the mid-to-high-nineties some businesses were forced to shut down while their power was off,

...and over 250,00 Columbus-area folks sweltered, some for hours, others for days, without air-conditioning, refrigeration, or the ability to charge their devices.

    Or else they found refuge at work or at cooling and WIFI centers set up around the city,     

...or with family or friends whose residences were over the outage or spared it altogether, as was mine. 
     For example, my son Tommy and his fiancée, Emily,

​...after the power blackout in their neighborhood rolled on to the next neighborhood, invited some power-deprived friends over for a cool sleep-over, while my nephew Randy and his wife Anusha, 

...stayed at our place until the blackout moved on from their street.
     Thus we Central Ohioans sweated otherwise and coped our way through a hot half-week of rolling blackouts.
      But this round of rolling blackouts reminded me of another episode of rolling blackouts I once experienced.
       In 2006 my daughter Claire spent most of the year working in the jungle on the outskirts of León, Nicaragua.
​
 Claire sharing a bus ride with a load of melons.

     It was when I went  to visit Claire (that's me, below, on a re-purposed American Army truck, old American trucks or school buses sometimes serving as the modes of transport that stopped at the bus stops),

...that I learned that in León there were rolling power blackouts everyday. 
​       Every night at 7 pm the lights would go out in the convent in León where Claire lived on the weekends and where I stayed while I was there. 

       When Claire's neighborhood went dark people walked or rode their bikes through the streets carrying flashlights. The buses still ran, and the streets in front of the open shops were lined with generators that were pulled out each night to keep the places up and open and running.
        And so nightly rolling blackouts in León, Nicaragua were business as usual.
      I know that the power came back on every morning at 3 am because every night I lay in bed sweating, then at 3 am by my watch the room fan would whirl back to life with a great "whoosh" and finally the room would get cool enough for me to fall asleep. (I suppose it was fortunate that I visited in October during the wintertime when the temperature seldom rose above 94 degrees Fahrenheit. Had I been there in the summertime the temperature likely would have been another ten degrees hotter. Still, I swear I never sweat so much in my life as when I was in Nicaragua).

    Along with the electricity, the water also went off daily in León on a rolling basis. This seemed not to make sense, as León was surrounded by tropical rainforest and during the wet winter season it rained every day. 
     So why would there be a chronic water shortage?
     The answer was explained to me by my wonderful young teacher at the language school in León where I spent my mornings learning Spanish while Claire worked.
       
       My teacher, Zorayda, in our classroom in León (Unfortunately my photography skills back then left something to be desired).

     Anyway, Zorayda told me that the reason for the rolling water outages was the  same as the for the rolling power blackouts: people couldn't afford to pay for their utilities. Zorayda said that at any one time only thirty percent of the population could afford to pay their water and utility bills. The country's way of dealing with this problem was, instead of having 70% of its people do without water and/or electricity all of the time, to have everybody do without 25% of the time. 
     I once told this story about the rolling power/water outages in Nicaragua to someone who commented that it wasn't fair to those who paid their bills to have to do without because of those who didn't pay. I explained that Nicaragua was a very poor country. At that time, as today still, Nicaragua was the second poorest country in the Western hemisphere after Haiti. According to Zorayda, it wasn't always the same people who weren't paying their bills. Someone might be able to pay one month, but not the next, while someone else might be able to pay that month, but might not have paid for a few months prior.
        And so that's the way León, Nicaragua opted to take care of the problem. Like the song says, "Today for you, tomorrow for me."