Men with Power Tools
It’s easy to make mistakes. It’s gotta be, considering the rate at which people are making them. And big ones. Like Gerald Bonnett, who was using a handheld metal grinder outside his home yesterday and generated some sparks that ignited the grass and caused a conflagration that required the attention of dozens of trucks and planes and fire crews. Now this may not make sense to folks in New Jersey who have been suffering torrential rains, but out here, we haven’t had rain since March, and with temperatures climbing over the century mark every day, the environs are like a tinderbox.
So ya gotta wonder why a 49-year-old man wouldn’t have the sense -- if he has to make sparks -- then to soak the ground around him and not start fires. Linda says because they put his name in the paper, it means that the authorities are going to go after this man for some of the expense of this accident that didn’t need to happen. Only one home was destroyed and no one seriously injured, but it could have been a disaster. The winds were unusually calm, but still the flames jumped several roads. And committing firefighting equipment and personnel to avoidable fires is especially risky this time of year.
The fire burned down power poles, of course, and our house seems to be at the end of the line. Whether it be drunk drivers crashing into poles or fires, our power goes out and it takes an inordinately long time to be restored. Last evening, while temperatures slowly cooled out of the upper nineties, more than 1100 PG&E customers were without air conditioning or fans until three o’clock in the morning, by which time it had already naturally cooled off.
The lack of electricity also prevented the affected households from watching the convention. They missed the Billary Clintons, those who didn’t venture into their oven-baked cars to listen on the radio. Not that they missed anything, of course, and they probably would have been the only ones watching. Likely as not, the hundreds of households affected by the power outage and evacuation had other plans for their evening.
Taking a somewhat Zen-like attitude, Linda and I sat quietly, enjoying the unusual silence. Not even the ubiquitous humming of appliances to interrupt our peace. But I ponder on the sizeable disruption of lives. Beyond those who went into marginal apoplexy because they couldn’t cocoon themselves in front of the television set, there were people missed important dates and were unable to call. People who couldn’t work and lost necessary wages.
All because a man already in his fiftieth year didn’t take the necessary precautions to prevent a forest fire. When I was in summer camp at age ten, everyone who went swimming in the lake had to move their name tag from a board that said outta the water to one that said swimming. If you forgot to move your tag back to the outta watter side, if they didn’t find you at the bottom of the lake, they made you wear a tag around your neck that read IDCO for Idiots Don’t Check Out.
Wearing a tag like that might not be enough. Maybe we should bring back stocks and pillories, especially for inattentive men with power tools.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.