Essential services for profit
Dozens of people have been evacuated from their flooded homes and thousands have been left without water after two water mains burst in north London.
And not just any North London.
About 60 firefighters were called to Belsize Road in Camden at about 02:50 GMT when homes were deluged with about 50cm (1.6ft) of water.
Belsize Road in Camden=Belsize Road in Hampstead, one of the very poshest and most desirable areas of London.
London Fire Brigade (LFB) said 24 people were led to safety and a hub was set up at Swiss Cottage Library.
Thames Water apologised after multiple postcodes were left without water.
The bitter joke is Thames Water is private, aka a profit-making corporation. It was part of Thatcher’s wave of privatization that also ruined London Transport. I’m seeing many bitter tweets about the huge profits Thames Water made last year at the expense of little things like checking the god damn water mains.
Oh, but it’s only water. Not that it’s essential for life or anything, the way gin and tonic are.
See “Shorting the Grid” by Meredith Angwin, for how ‘ deregulation’ of electricity grids did far more harm than good. The big problem is that on the ‘deregulated’ grids nobody has an incentive & responsibility to make things *reliable* an for many they get more profits if things *approach* failure.
A friend of mine in college (in Texas) couldn’t understand how Oklahoma had not only recycling but renewable power options. Oklahoma is (or hadn’t at that time; since I’ve been gone, they’ve done a lot of things) public. He had bought into the lie that private ownership is the only way toward progress.
I’ve worked in both public and private jobs; I was not impressed with the efficiency of the private firms where I worked.
Another example is California’s Pacific Gas and Electric. How many fires now?
the contrarian in me, I have to admit, says there is no way an above ground power distribution network can be 100%. I am not sanguine about California government being safer in this case? See: Flint, Michigan.
the other problem is peoples insistence on living in fire prone hillside areas…which also requires more power lines! one favorite example is the family who moved from a fire devastated subdivision in Santa Rosa to a heavily forested semi rural fire prone canyon neighborhood inParadise, CA. Which then burned. Sad…but