On Friday, July 20, a few seconds after 4:30 p.m., electricity in Crawford Bay went off. It stayed off here on the East Shore of Kootenay Lake for 26 hours.
Massive failures also occurred in the Okanagan and other parts of the West Kootenay.
Now it is widely believed in other parts of this province that we here on the East Shore don’t matter as much as the Okanagan, because we are all a bunch of hippies.
Some even call the East Shore “Dogpatch.”
Well, I say we matter just as much as the Okanagan, and have equal rights to speedy restoration of electricity after an outage, no matter how great.
In fact I will go much further and call for the transfer of the Okanagan from FortisBC to BC Hydro. It should have been done long ago; our higher electricity rates reflect that.
Without the Okanagan, there is enough generating capacity in the Kootenays to avoid having to buy electricity from outside sources, mainly BC Hydro.
Will the BC Utilities Commission order the transfer of the Okanagan to BC Hydro?
We may hope for this, perhaps in vain because, after all, we live in Dogpatch, and the tail must not be allowed to wag the dog.
David George, Dogpatch (Crawford Bay)