Governor considers emergency radio station, airport power

This arti­cle first appeared on my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=194

http://starbulletin.com/2006/10/17/news/story02.html

Gov­er­nor Linda Lin­gle is con­sid­er­ing adding emer­gency power gen­er­a­tors at Hon­olulu Inter­na­tional Air­port. More than 5,000 out­bound trav­ellers were forced to wait in long lines as TSA screen­ers exam­ined all bag­gage by hand. There was insuf­fi­cient elec­tri­cal power to run the auto­mated screen­ing equip­ment. http://starbulletin.com/2006/10/17/news/story09.html

It is inter­est­ing to note that the air­lines were able to han­dle the excep­tions eas­ily. I didn’t know that Hawai­ian Air­lines gets its jet fuel from Sin­ga­pore. Won­der how much stock they have on hand at the Hon­olulu airport?

Lin­gle also said that the state may set up an emer­gency radio sta­tion to broad­cast offi­cial announce­ments. This is a very good idea that should have been imple­mented long ago. This radio sta­tion could be kept on “warm standby” and started at a moment’s notice, as NORAD is prepar­ing to do with its Cheyenne Moun­tain instal­la­tion in Colorado.

While the gov­er­nor did call KSSK twice to make ad hoc addresses to the pop­u­lace on Sun­day morn­ing, she has become con­cerned that Clear Chan­nel and other broad­cast­ers were unable to respond quickly when the power out­age occurred.

Sadly, civil defense is one area that is often cut when tax rev­enue fal­ters. Tax­pay­ers don’t notice the cuts until a dis­as­ter hap­pens and sup­port is hard to find.

We’re now see­ing how thin the state’s plans really were.

Tagged as: blackout, budget, electricity, government, politics, power, radio