WHY IT WILL HAPPEN ELSEWHERE

Why?

Because since the 1965 blackout, 3 coal-fired plants have been closed to comply with clean air standards. The plunder took place in air unfouled by coal emissions, though polluted by the smell of decaying perishables.

Because the price of constructing new capacity has been raised so high by the social engineers and their legalistic maneuvres that Con Ed had to abandon two plants and refrain from building others. Small is beautiful, but the bid for the blackout is big and ugly, and the social engineers will send it to the US taxpayer.

Because Con Ed could not even get away with building a pumped storage plant (Storm King); it might have endangered the minnows in the Hudson, which lived to see the night of income redistribution. And there is no court that will sentence the ecosaboteurs to pay for the untold millions of damage they helped to bring about when they killed the Storm King project.

Storm King would not have had enough water in the late evening when the lightning struck, they say now, with the coo superiority of one who 10 years ago foresaw the exact time of day when the lightning would strike.

"Gross negligence" charged Mayor Beam with the iron logic of faulting a man who got a headache when he was mugged - he should have had his aspirin pills with him.

The New York avantgarde has shown us a glimpse of the future, 14 western states for example, are linked in a mutual-aid grid of 88,000 MW total capacity, of which just under half (41,000 MW) are hydroelectric. What if there is another year or two of drought? What if there is another winter like the last? The nuclear plants, invulnerable to the weather, but slowed or killed by the anti-nukes' legalistic stratagems will be missing: Across the country, 14 badly needed reactors have been canceled in the last 3 years, and 96 others deferred. It takes 5 years to build a nuclear plant, 6 more to overcome environmentalist obstructions, and then the government may change its mind and order a redesign that will all but bankrupt the utility. The anti-nukes were crushingly defeated at the ballot boxes last year, but the well-heeled social engineers need no ballot box to impose their will on the people. It is almost too late now to prevent brown-outs and blackouts by the early 1980's.

And it will not be faulty lightning arresters that will plunge the country into darkness.