Gee, do you think Florida or the Gulf Coast will be hit by another hurricane someday? These storms come every year and they are expected to increase in number and intensity. How many times does it have to happen before people realize that electricity is the first thing to go in any sizable storm? Without electricity, elevators, lights, cash registers, telephones, freezers and refrigerators don’t work and pumping stations that depend on electricity can’t pump fresh water to homes and businesses or gasoline for vehicles.

In our electricity dependent society, a big storm knocks out our power grids and everything comes to a stop until power is restored.

When is something going to be done about it? We cannot go on pretending that it isn’t going to happen again.

In a State like Florida , the obvious solution is to locate all power and telephone lines underground encased in waterproof shielding. Put transformers and substations in ventilated waterproof bunkers.

Don’t tell me it can’t be done. I have a friend, H.J. Merrihue who, of all things, operates out of New Orleans and lays underwater cable on the ocean bottom. It’s a dangerous and difficult job, but he has a trained crew of divers. Years ago, when H.J. bought a forty-eight foot sailboat for his own pleasure, I put the name on it for him. The name was “Cable’s Length,” a reference to how deep a heavily weighted and helmeted diver can go and still be pumped air from a vessel on the surface.

If you can lay electrical cable on the ocean floor, you can certainly bury it safely underground. We’ve had the technology to do this for ages. What’s holding it up?

The answer to that is money. The costs of getting rid of all those old fashioned telephone poles that have existed from the days when Thomas Edison’s and Alexander Graham Bell’s new inventions were tied in with Western Union to use those ugly poles that are still spread throughout our cities and neighborhoods. You could say that we’ve only advanced one stage beyond the Pony Express.

With humor and sarcasm, I tried to point this out in a recent article titled “Beavers to the Levees’ that dealt with the current (no pun intended) problem in New Orleans . It’s not something that couldn’t be overcome, especially when a city has to be almost completely rebuilt.

New subdivisions and developments are now and have for several years been putting these utilities underground. And the idea of central core utility systems in buildings has been around since the days of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan. In flood prone areas and coastal cities, the central utility core can even be safely brought to floors higher than basements or ground level.

What it comes down to is – how much is human life worth? Would you like to put that question to the relatives of those who died recently in hurricane Katrina, Rita, and Wilma and might have been saved? Would you like to ask the people still standing in line for water and ice in South F lorida, the drivers waiting in line for gasoline from the few stations operating their pumps on generators, or the thousands of displaced people from New Orleans?

With our government borrowing over a hundred billion dollars this month alone, October of 2005, five to twenty billion to put power and communications lines underground in the entire State of Florida and the Gulf Coast is a drop in the bucket.

Instead of waging senseless religious wars against Islam and killing thousands of women and children in the Middle East, George W. Bush and his gang could at least divert a bit of this credit card money (part of which is stolen from Social Security) to protecting our own people from inevitable natural disasters. But then, that’s a matter of presidential priorities isn’t it?

If this means helping the private enterprise power companies redo their electrical and communications systems – so what. It wouldn’t be the first time that the government has helped these monopolies. And I’m certain some sort of payback could be arranged in the form of tax breaks or taxes on tourists, casinos, and those who choose to live in these hurricane prone areas.