Power outage!

I was happily using the bathroom - when vooom, no power. The UPS on my computer was merrily beeping away, and I figured it would come back on its own - it usually does, there are a lot of tiny outages here. After 10 minutes - zilch! So, I called the City of Columbia - half expecting to have to argue that I had in fact paid my bill (so I went to gmail on my phone, and retrieved my payment history just in case). It turns out that a car hit a telephone pole, and knocked out power to the north side of Columbia!

First of all, I hope nobody was hurt. There's nothing in the news about it, other than the accident - so I assume everyone's ok.

Second, I have to ask - why can one motorist knock out power to a large chunk of the city? Utility companies used to be known for their reliability - in fact, much of the appeal of "utility" style computing comes from offering the kind of legendary "you flip the switch, and it works" reliability for which utility companies are known. I don't know if the woes of Columbia's electrical grid are related to their director resigning (of course they don't say that it is, but they probably wouldn't if it were! ), but it's a pretty poor state of affairs. Over the years, they have blamed squirrels, trees, motorists, and the weather (the latter sometimes being a valid excuse). One thing that is never raised, however, is the apparent lack of redundancy.
Normally, when you design a utility grid - you design it as a grid, or a series of loops - with multiple feeds available for a given area. That way, when a small-scale incident hits one area, that area can still pull power from another feed. This doesn't work on the micro-scale; it's quite expected for an incident to affect a small area around that incident. It's not ok for one car to knock out half of Columbia (including part of campus)!

Sadly, I doubt that much will be done. Investing in public services appears to not be much of a priority here lately.