This morning I paid a visit to Venerable Mom, whose house is without power and heat because a transformer a block away blew out early this morning. Despite her advanced years (which I once alluded to here, at some risk to life and limb), she took a perverse pride in leading me outside, where she pointed out two missing sections of sidewalk close to her house, marked with straggly orange tape and a forlorn traffic cone. "That's where the transformer blew out," she said, "and PGE hasn't replaced the sidewalk yet." I said that PGE could hardly be expected to replace the sidewalk that quickly, if the transformer blew out early this morning.
"Oh, no," she told me, "that's not where today's transformer blew out. Today's transformer is over there," and she pointed in a different direction. "This transformer (the one where the sidewalk was removed) is the one that blew out on September 18. PGE took out the sidewalk to repair the transformer, and since then PGE has been here three times to 'look at the sidewalk.' 'When will you replace the sidewalk?' I asked the third inspector. 'I don't know,' he said, 'I just came to inspect it. I don't know when we'll replace it.'"
I'm not complaining about Venerable Mom being without heat and lights -- because of her Depression-era thrift she doesn't turn the lights on and keeps the thermostat set to a sub-Arctic figure anyway -- but until PGE repairs the gaping hole by Venerable Mom's house it doesn't deserve to have new owners. Come to think of it, PGE probably doesn't deserve its current owners, either. I don't know that Erik Sten could get today's transformer repaired any faster, but I'm confident that he would at least replace the sidewalk before Mom falls into the hole.