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Baghdad on the Potomac

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from: Timothy Noah

Posted Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2006, at 5:42 PM ET

I hate to be a bore, but it sure is hot. I mean that literally; the East Coast is going through a nasty heat wave right now. The National Weather Service predicts that in New York City the temperature will hit 105 degrees Fahrenheit on August 2. Washington, where I live, is expected to hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit. "Could It Be Any Hotter?" reads a Page One headline in today's Washington Post. The answer, apparently, is yes.

When temperatures get this high in the capital city of the richest nation on earth, I find myself wondering when the electricity will go out. My power was out for about six hours the other day, and I counted myself lucky; in previous years, my house has been without electricity for as much as one full week. Welcome to Baghdad on the Potomac!

Mary-Beth Hutchinson, a spokesperson for Pepco, the local utility, tells the Post, "We don't foresee any problems either on our system or on the [power] grid." That's contradicted by one of my favorite Web sites, currentenergylbl.gov, which indicates that the current load in the D.C. region exceeds both the predicted load and the maximum capacity. But that's probably a mistake. The folks at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab who set up currentenergylbl.gov posted a disclaimer saying that maintenance on this site ended in January 2005, and "parameters on which the computations depend will become out-of-date." What a disappointment.

Pepco may not anticipate a regional blackout, but it would never be rash enough to predict no localized blackouts. The utility's Web site maintains a map of the Washington area, organized by ZIP code and updated every 30 minutes, that thoughtfully provides information on current power outages. As I write, there are 416, in a city that isn't particularly large. (If you want an update, click here.) I reprint the bad news below. To read my footnotes, roll your mouse over the portions highlighted in yellow. Thanks for indulging me on this dog day.

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Hey, that's my neighborhood, damn it! But I phoned home and the machine picked up. That means the electricity's on.
The power outages are mostly concentrated in the city's eastern half, which is also its poorer half. I doubt that's a coincidence.
Maryland's Montgomery County is the richest of these four jurisdictions. Note that it has the fewest outages. [Update, 7:30 p.m.: OK, now there are 1682 outages in Montgomery County against 413 in DC and 313 in Prince George's County. I don't know why.]
hot document
entries
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from: Timothy Noah

Posted Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2006, at 5:42 PM ET
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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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