15 August 2003

Juice

It's payday, and that is going to juice up the weekend. Money is energy sometimes. Ben Afflick has plenty of that. He is 31 today:filled with juice, young, movie-star good looks and blessed with millions to care about him. Julia Childs is 91. She still has enough juice to get by but not a lot of excess capacity. Sort of like the northeast quadrant of the United States and Canada. Sixty years between Ben and Julia. In fact, just about enough time to sandwich me, end-to-end. The juice we have, the life force, is an interesting feature of the human condition. It flows like volts from the terminals on a battery. Ben is on the positive side and Julia on the negative side. Last time I saw her on TV, she was getting a little translucent. Just before Bob Hope passed away he appeared paper-thin, almost like you could see right through him. I’m in the middle someplace. The misery index is supposed to be 105 today. I feel like I am draining energy in the moist Washington heat.

I don't want to put on clothes and go downtown. The concept of juice has a queer tangential relationship to the two things that went wrong yesterday. The first one affected fifty million people. The other one didn't, only 143 elderly folks in Vancouver, Canada's Riviera. I have the luxury of taking a contemplative view of both events. The beer remains cold here, there is plenty of ice and juice to power the big screen televisions so we can watch the thousands walking home on the expressways.

I was working on a memo capturing a White House meeting. I missed the initial flurry of activity. I was not apprised at the moment the lights failed. Calise, the lovely high-waisted lady from Intergovernmental Affairs, was the first one to stop by and tell me that things had gone to hell from Detroit all along the Queensway to Toronto and then down to New York. The power was out. No Juice.

She wanted to know if it was terrorism, and if something awful was about to happen to us, too. I turned on the television and marveled at the images of the crowds. Orderly, calm, walking along the New York expressways. Walking home. The commentators seemed more panicked than the crowds. I imagine some of them were broadcasting from studios in the affected areas, already on un-interruptible backup power sources, siphoning some juice from a generator in the basement while everyone else in their building was looking at blank screens.

One thing about the response to 9-11, we have exercised our backup systems and the key places were still up and communicating. There was a limited amount of juice and it was being used to tell us about the situation. All the financial markets went to backup right away, NASDAQ even conducting its after-hours trading session while Manhattan stayed dark.

I finished the memo and punched it off into the cybervoid. Nobody answers my finely crafted reports anymore, which is fine with me. Professionalism is the last bastion of the soon to be departed employee. Residual professionalism carried me out of my large office with bare walls, the juice just about out of this job. I need to milk it to transition a few weeks hence, and that seems to be fine with management. I walked over to the command center. There was a flurry of activity there, just as it should be. The watch officer had sent an e-mail I didn't get to mark the gravity of the occasion. The question of the moment was whether the terrorists had sparked the cascade of failure that tripped a quarter of the northern hemisphere off the line. It did not appear to be the case, at least according to the talking heads. There was a deliberate effort to put out the word that this was an act of God, not of man. That seemed to go a long way to making it all OK.

Power demands are said by the Electric Power Institute in Palo Alto to be up 30% over the last decade while generating capability is only up 15%. As a society we have an insatiable thirst for juice, though we have an aversion to new power plants. Even our quest for mobile connectivity produces more gadgets that must be plugged into the wall. I asked the usual questions to show my concern, though my role did not appear to be of any particular criticality. The backup generators were operating, there was juice available in case our grid went down in some spontaneous act of sympathy to the one adjacent. I asked if there were provisions to get the Command Post bus out of the garage, so it would not be trapped by recalcitrant electrical security barriers. I inquired if they had triaged the personnel, lined up the overtime so we could have more people to augment the watch overnight if necessary.

They had.

Feeling irrelevant to the crisis in progress, I walked out of the center confident I had nothing to contribute that would mitigate the situation. I turned my attention from the macro situation to the micro. My car was in the garage, downhill from an electric security barrier, and I was on the wrong side of the 14th Street Bridge from where I lived. The situation seemed fairly clear to me, and I had a social engagement across town. I gathered up by briefcase and put my jacket over my arm and walked to the bank of elevators that serve the east side of the building and the parking garage below. Our grid stayed up long enough to carry me there, there was plenty of juice in the battery of my convertible, and the usual madness approaching the bridges across the Potomac was predictable. The Congress was on holiday, traffic only snarled briefly and it was exactly fifteen minutes to the parking structure at the Capitol City Brewery in Shirlingon.

My pal Joe was waiting at the bar as we had agreed and the beer was cold. We watched the commuters walking out of New York and clustering around the ferry terminals. That was the big story, and it will be for days. I'm sure we lost some people in the heat and stillness of the concrete towers but don't know it yet. There will be success and failure in restoring power, and a spike in the birthrate nine months hence. The public communications were pretty effective as the crisis unfolded. We have been working on that and it shows. There were a lot of comforting words from public officials, from the President on down. "Don’t panic," they said calmly. "It’s OK. It is not Osama and his boys and power will be restored presently." There were a few scattered reports of looting in the Bronx and Detroit, though I was hard pressed to imagine what might be left to steal there.

Things were fine in Shirlington, and the second beer was as cold as the first as we sat in air-conditioned comfort, consuming power. They were starting the finger-

pointing exercise on the TV, not even waiting for the facts to come it. Canadian officials were already indignantly claiming that the problem originated in the U.S. It is going to be entertaining to watch it play out, so long as our grid stays up. The thing that worries me is that we are explaining how everything works, exposing another vulnerability in our delicate system-of-systems. There will be a lot of helpful tips for those that want to destroy us. The story is going to have a lot of juice.

There was a filler story on the cable news about a nursing home in Vancouver. That was the smaller crisis. Over a hundred sick, some dead. The curious thing was that some of them tested positive for SARS, the disease we had assured ourselves had been expunged. There was no logical explanation for it. Vancouver had been one of the first cities the virus had visited, coming out of Hong Kong. There had been a minor outbreak there at the beginning of the crisis in Canada, but the chain of contagion had been broken and the spark of disease stopped. Maybe. But the second flare-up in Toronto had appeared unexpectedly in a nursing home twenty days after what they believe was the last case. There was something curious about it, something downright peculiar. They are going to be spinning up on that score, even as the electricity comes back on line in the eastern provinces.

We wondered if it was going to come back in the fall, if there might be a reservoir of the virus someplace we didn't know about. It is entirely possible that SARS had a little more juice than we thought. Which could make for a most interesting fall. We considered the possibilities, and then ordered another cold beer. Our grid could be on the verge of failing and there might not be any more.

Be prepared. That’s my motto.