OG&E stood back as tree limbs and their infrastructure came crashing to the ground, a painful reminder of all the maintenance they didn’t do since the last major ice storm brought tree limbs and their electrical infrastructure crashing to the ground. If those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, OG&E is condemning the rest of us to its blunders for two miserable weeks once a decade for the rest of our lives. Unfortunately for us all, it happened during a once-in-a-century pandemic that doubtlessly seeded community spread as people scrambled desperately around a ghost city in search of light and heat.
And they can’t blame the short-term memory loss on the passage of State Question 788, because, while they can’t seem to find the money for infrastructure upkeep, they somehow found $25,000 in the sofa cushions to oppose its passage in 2018. And of course they could find an extra few hundred thousand the next year to increase the compensation package of CEO Sean Trauschke to more than $6.4 million, or the cost of more than 20,000 cheap electrical generators that could have been supplied to the city’s neediest customers. But hey, these are just human lives at stake and, really, what’s tens of thousands of grandmothers shivering in the dark worth compared to the needs of the shareholders in a public monopoly that perennially fails catastrophically anyway?