Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

So the Gov’nah changed his philosophy on oil drilling off the coast of Florida, and so have other already-elected officials in a huge flip-flop while gas prices are huge (with thanks to speculation in commodities trading).

So riddle us this — do you approve of oil drilling off the coast of Florida?

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The Tampa Electric Company (TECO) needs a new transmission line out in Seffner.

YouTube user JoyIng1 posted a video with concerns for the environment:

Tampa Electric Company plans to clearcut wetlands with bald eagle nest for high voltage transmission corridor in Hillsborough County, Florida.

None of this is a big deal - people post videos and write blogs about a million different things. But this time, TECO responded with their own video.

Wlongstr says he is a manager, and lists his website as tecoenergy.com. Two days after JoyIng1 put her vdieo on the YouTube, wlongstr posted his own video:

Tampa Electric’s Willow Oak-Davis transmission line is one of the company’s major projects needed to support reliability in Florida. With growth in the area, it has become impossible to locate a power line in a way that makes everyone happy. Here, one of TECO’s environmental engineers explains how Tampa Electric uses feedback from the public and other criteria to decide where lines should go.

Pretty interesting to see corporations reaching out to address individual criticisms.

Verizon is making a killing on this FiOS gimmick. The demand for FiOs is so overwhelming, that at the beginning of this year, the company moved a bunch of repair technicians away from fixing landline telephone service in order to install service for those new hungry FiOS customers. 

Because of that, some landline customers have had to wait up to a week for phone repair.  But that’s a problem. The State of Florida wants to make sure that your phone works if you have to call 911, so they require phone companies to repair service within 24 hours at least 95 percent of the time in any given area. 

Verizon knew they were not quite meeting that goal, so they went to the Public Service Commission in March to ask for an exemption.  Thankfully, the PSC said no, and in fact began a probe to see just how bad Verizon was performing.

Turns out that over the past 6 years, Verizon’s record declined steadily, and failed to meet the standards 262 times in 2007, compared with five times in 2001.  What was their excuse?

Verizon officials traveled to Tallahassee in April to tell regulators that the company was simply overwhelmed with demand for the FiOS service…

Attorney General Bill McCollum is not impressed, and asked the PSC to open a formal case, and begin piling on the fines.  At $25,000 per violation in 2007, the petition calls for over $6.5 million in fines.

Go Florida!

One of the stated goals of Tampa’s Department of Clean is to be in the top ten cleanest cities. I know you are wondering where we stand right now.

The Department of Clean references a pdf of the list of cleanest/dirtiest big cities in the US. They don’t include the source, but after a bit of digging, I found a very similar list that was compiled by Reader’s Digest. RD compared the 50 biggest cities in five categories: Air, Water, Toxics, Hazardous Waste, and Sanitation. Tampa ranks #31 overall, beaten by sixty percent of all cities.

Yep - we’re dirtier than such pristine places such as Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Milwaukee. Portland, San Jose, and Buffalo top the list as cleanest. Orlando ranks 9th - Florida’s best showing here. Chicago is dirtiest, followed closely by New York and Pittsburgh.

Tampa scored tenth best in Air quality, and ranked the nation’s best(!) in Sanitation. Unfortunately, the city is 17th worst in both Toxics and Hazardous Waste. Even more shocking is our ranking in Water Quality - Tampa is THIRD WORST in the nation behind only New York City and Oklahoma City (Oklahoma City?).

So what is the Department of (sorta) Clean doing to improve water quality here? Nothing, really. On one hand, they promise to work on “Reducing & eliminating illegal dumping activities,” which should help. But then again, they are also in charge of “Treating major thoroughfares and residential corridors with herbicide spray application,” which probably won’t do much good for our water quality.

Besides, water quality is the job of the Water Department, and they think Tampa’s water is good enough to bottle!

I’m thinking Tampa won’t make it into the top ten any time soon.

The city of Tampa Solid Waste department has been picking up garbage, but not billing for it.

lost revenue to the city: $405.57 a month.

Billing problems like that for commercial garbage collection have resulted in a potential loss of revenue of up to $118,648 a month for the city’s Solid Waste Department, according to an internal auditor’s report.

That could add up to more than $1.4-million a year of unbilled services in the $69-million-a-year department.

Incompetence or Corruption?

If you stay home, you are gonna run up the electricity bill.

So you head to the course to pick up wayward golf balls. You are into the pond to gather a few more when a gator decides that you will be his lunch.

It’s scary enough to give you the hiccups for three weeks straight.

The trick to getting rid of hiccups - eat a tablespoon of peanut butter.

You may want to avoid the peanut butter that includes a free dose of salmonella.

Of course, you can get salmonella just by visiting the beach.

As long as you can afford $500-a-night hotel rooms in Clearwater.

But then again, you can get sick at the office, too.

Might as well stay home.

It was around 11am on Saturday. I was sitting in the living room, still trying to wake up after another great gig on Friday night. Wifey came running in from the garage: “I think the washer is broken.”

I got up and stumbled out to the laundry area. Wifey said she just opened the lid, and the water slowed down. “See?” she pointed. “The water is usually coming out much faster than that.” And reaching inside up through the diminished waterfall, “I can’t feel anything blocking it here. Oh, don’t tell me we need a new washing machine.”

I wasn’t gonna tell her anything of the sort. Discussions involving hundreds of dollars is nothing to be avoided, but certainly needs more planning than “Wake up! There’s a problem!”

Now, I’m not much a handyman, and I’m seriously debilitated in the mornings. So, to give me a few minutes to consider the possibilities (read: stall for time), I slowly walked over and opened the garage door. It was a beautiful, bright day with a comfortable breeze. I surveyed the neighborhood, and down the street I saw a couple hundred bucks being put back into my wallet.

About a block away, water was gushing out into the road at an incredible rate. Meanwhile, a county worker was out in front of my yard with a can of spray paint and a handful of flags. I asked him, “What are you up to?” He never broke his stride marking with paint, raising tiny flags, and moving along: “I broke the water main.”

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Remember when Verizon first started installing FIOS cable around here? As an introduction to each neighborhood, they would tear up sewer lines, break water mains, and all sorts of mayhem. Then the county got tired of going to fix up these screw-ups and told Verizon to knock it off.

Well, we haven’t heard much about many mishaps since then. Before Verizon even gets started now, the county makes sure everything is marked well so Verizon can steer clear of mishaps. It seems they have the installation down to a science. Sorta.

On a recent Saturday, Hillsborough County had an employee out in the neighborhood to mark the sewer and water lines. He used some kind of scanning device to find the pipes, then he paints the ground, and puts up a tiny flag. Blue flags & paint is for water, while green is used for sewer.

But apparently the guy had trouble locating the water line right next to a telephone pole. In order to properly identify the location of the line, he decided to stick a crowbar in the ground, hoping to come in contact with it. And he did.

The thirty year old water main busted, and the neighborhood now had water gushing out into a couple driveways, the street, and making an ever-wider, ever deeper hole directly next to that concrete power pole.

But it doesn’t really matter. Verizon is finally getting to the neighborhood, and there is much joy, even from the guy with a new eight foot hole in his front yard.

66 years ago…

January 24, 1941 – President Roosevelt grants initial approval for a nearly $5 million Works Project Administration sewer system initiative in Tampa.

Courtesy of the Tampa Bay History Center.