Power not to the people but to the pipeline

The liberal line that the Bush administration serves at the pleasure of Big Oil surely gets fuel from this bit of post-Katrina news: On the evening of Aug. 30 and morning of Aug. 31, officials in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and the Energy Department made multiple phone calls ordering that electricity be restored to a south Mississippi pipeline that sends fuel to the Northeast. Never mind that powering up the pipeline left hospitals, city water systems and everything else powerless for 24 hours longer than they might have otherwise been.
“I considered it a presidential directive to get those pipelines operating,” one power company manager told the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American. “I reluctantly agreed to pull half our transmission line crews off other projects and made getting the transmission lines to the Collins substations a priority.”
Another entry on the long Katrina-related list headed: What were they thinking?
Posted by Rhonda Holman