June 14, 2004

This morning in a rural area with lots of new development NW of downtown Phoenix near Sun City a transformer farm (a bunch of electrical transformers I guess) exploded and caused a massive interruption in the power grid that tripped breakers at the Palo Verde Nuclear power plant near Phoenix that shut the 3 reactors down. The grid was impacted as far as Texas with outages reported in Tucson as well. The libertarian candidate for congressional dist.# 8 is a refueling supervisor/tech/glow in the dark guy at the Palo Verde plant, but he is in Boston right now. When he gets back he’ll find out what really happened and share it with us.

What is interesting is that a little birdy shared a conversation that his father overheard in a coffee shop where the local police and fire department hang out. The fire chief of one of the towns that bordered the transformer area (Surprise, Az.) was in a helicopter at the time the call came in. He directed the pilot to the site where he could see that the fire trucks had just arrived and were putting out the small desert brush fires from the downed lines and explosion sparks. As he came in close a white Suburban pulled out from under some cover and camoed “troops” jumped out and leveled their guns at the helicopter. The helicopter then backed off but was motioned to land. The Fire Chief and the troops exchanged “who are you’s” and separated. While relaying this story to his LEO and fire Department buddies at the coffee shop next to City Hall in downtown Surprise, overheard by my informant’s father. The question was, how did those guys get there so fast in full battle gear? How many FBI/Homeland Security/Grid Guards are there and where are they stationed so that they could be on scene so fast as to beat a helicoptered Fire Chief and other Emergency vehicles.

Makes you go Hummmmmmm.

Name withheld
Phoenix, AZ