Monday, August 28, 2006

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Saturday’s storm brings out the best, the worst, and the neighbors.

Saturday’s storm dumped three to four inches of rain on Pueblo in about 45 minutes. The winds caused a lot of damage, especially on the North Side and in Belmont. We lost two enormous tree limbs, which did not fall on anyone or anything other than the ground, luckily. As far as we can tell, a tornado started forming in the area and while it didn’t actually touch down, the winds were still very damaging.

One good thing we saw was that a work crew from the county jail was already out clearing the streets of tree limbs within two hours of the storm hitting. Of course, we live about half a block from Parkview Hospital, so that may account for some of the promptness. But someone had a plan and didn’t wait to put it into action. That’s good to know.

We lost electricity about 5:30 pm Saturday and got it back about 9:45 pm last night. There was one “teaser” around 7:15 pm when the electricy came on just long enough for us to get all the clocks on all the electronics re-set, then it crashed again. Tree limbs tangled in the wires caused the transformer to blow and they tried to catch fire, but were pretty wet.  I looked out the window to see the fire truck already in place. The fire captain told me that the previous night’s crew had had so many downed wire calls they hadn’t been able to keep up with the reports and that he’d spent most of his shift so far (12 hours) just working downed wire calls like the one they were on.  And he didn’t see any end in sight.

Anyway, while we were watching the tree trimmer cutting the limbs away from the electrical wires we met the neighbors from the end of the alley. I don’t understand why these minor disasters seem to be some of the best neighbor-meeting opportunities. I met more of my neighbors in Englewood digging out from heavy snow storms than I did at any other time, and this storm with trees all over the place was the same.

Mineral Palace Park, two blocks to the east of us, is a mess. Some trees were uprooted, others lost limbs, and one looked like it just split in two. However, the Parks department is already cleaning up. From the looks of some of them, they’ve even got the office help out picking up tree limbs.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

No Call Revisited

Sorry to say, it’s not working as advertised.

Back on May 8, I described how easy it was to sign up for Colorado’s No Call list. I eagerly looked forward to the day when there would no longer be any calls. That day was supposed to be August 1. We kept getting calls. Last night I went to the web site to complain. I filled out the first page of the complaint form, hit “Continue” and got the following message:

You cannot file a complaint until 30 days after the release of the official list, which will be 8/9/2006.

This is in stark contrast to the statement in the FAQs section where it says the list would be updated July 31 and we could start complaining August 1. (Scroll down to see the update schedule.)

Further, there is now a notice warning people that they now need to sign up on the federal no call list as well, since the federal list is no longer accepting uploads from the states. (This, especially, makes no sense to me. They’ve gone from receiving data from about 50 clients, to receiving data from several million.)

I don’t know where the glitch is, but Colorado taxpayers are paying for it and as a Colorado taxpayer, I object. The Colorado Public Utilities Commission has a contract with this company to maintain and update the No Call list on a certain schedule and they’ve failed to do that. In fact, I figure they’re about 39 days late. I hope the company is paying a failure to perform penalty. If they’re not, I want whoever is responsible for approving the contract to have their performance review marked appropriately.

This is what’s known as “accountability” and I want the accounting done.