"Live Better Electrically - Carry A Flashlight"

Most of the time when I worked for B.C. Hydro, it had its own Construction Division, and its own Transmission Division, and it knew how to build the kind of lines required for linking its megaprojects with downtown. That began back in the 1960s, when we first started creating a unified central grid network, and retiring all those noisy, high-maintenance diesel-electric plants so common in every little town and village in the vast majority of Beautiful British Columbia.

That was then, and this is now, as one of my old supervisors was so fond of saying, and now, the fly-now-pay-later kids have taken over, and their problem is that they grew up thinking '60 cycles' means 'five dozen bikes'. And that isn't being helped with 'our home on the natives' land.' 

Giving the country back to the Indians isn't an option, because, among other things, they don't want the damned thing - all they really want to do is collect the rent on it, so they'll have money for whiskey and new pickup trucks and supplies to make into protest signs and banners. They'd rather bitch than eat, and if you lived five blocks from a big-city Reserve like I do, you'd know how fond they are of eating. Some of those squaws are two axe-handles across the stern, and really ought to be equipped with clearance lights, like the trucks.

So you can't find acceptable towers for the new EHV lines, huh? Here's an idea from an old-timer who has been in the business a few decades. Talk to the folks at Hydro Quebec. They had 750-Kv transmission towers back in the 1960s, and those must be working OK, because the lights are still on in New York City. This is not an insoluble problem. And I know for sure about that 750-Kv, because I was function-testing the big line disconnect switches for it at I.T.E. Circuit Breaker Canada Ltd., on Dixie Road, in what was then Port Credit, Ontario, now called Mississauga, back in the summer of 1966. And those worked OK too. We did good work. Too bad B.C. Hydro can't!