The biggest F-F-F-F-Blunder in B.C. Hydro's history...

And there have been some dandies in the past, like that mass-early-retirement scheme that was basically termination with bonuses, back in March, 1988 that they announced, being all heart like they are, just before Christmas of 1987... I remember that one well, because I was caught in that shit ten years before I turned 65, and lost about half a million dollars in wages and benefits in it.

But I'm digressing - sorry about that - and this is about Site 'C' on the Peace River, in northern British Columbia. It's called 'Site 'C' ' because it will be the third development along the Peace River in that area. The first was Portage Mountain, better known now as 'GMS', for 'Gordon M. Shrum' a former fearless leader of our illustrious megawatt manufacturing monstrosity. The second was Peace Canyon, just slightly upstream from the lovely little village of Hudson's Hope, better known among us locals as 'Hudson's Last Hope'. We had the only bar in captivity with a ceiling made from old egg crates. That's the kind of 'class' the town had. It had lots of class, but it was all fifth!

And Site 'C' was originally scheduled to have been built in the mid-1970s, when Hydro had already consulted with the local Buckskins, and acquired the land for it, and did all the preliminary planning. We've planned and re-planned that goddamned project so often, it's ridiculous! And if we'd built it when we first got the process going, it would have paid for itself fifteen years ago and would now be producing pure profit. Are we stupid, or what? That's today's Question Everything.

They ought to name that goddamned thing after me, because I've been bugging Dear Editor and the PR people at Hydro for over a quarter of a century to get on with the job and add its output to the central grid, because nothing's forever, and we do need the power. In part because California still owes us half a billion dollars plus interest for the power we donated to them during Governor Gray Davis' self-imposed blackouts in 2000-2001 while he was trying to re-write the rules for electricity distribution. He failed miserably, and we got stuck with the bill for being helpful. Nice bunch of guys!

So....will I actually live to see Site 'C' become a functioning reality finally producing power after more than 40 years in the planning? If they keep on planning it, electricity will be obsolete before they get to the actual construction phase of the project. We'll be producing power the nuclear way, and transmitting it with lasers, and the Peace River, thanks to global warming, will have become an alligator infested sub-tropical swamp where the only things electric will be the electric eels in the waters  of it. Because time marches on, trampling everything underfoot.