Infrastructure: They're Letting Harlem Rot

[mfcorey1]

Rangel (D-NY) has confirmed that ConEd admits that the explosion in Harlem was caused by natural gas, not terrorism. In fact, the soil under the building that exploded had a natural gas concentration of 20 percent, according to the NY Daily News.

The NY Daily News is very careful in its Con Ed coverage. Con Ed provides electricity, natural gas, and steam power to the city. It's powerful. It's local.

Look to Time for more audacious coverage. Its headline was Harlem Building Collapse Highlights America’s Dangerously Old Gas Infrastructure:

American’s use of natural gas goes back to the early 1900s, and some of the pipes funneling gas beneath city streets today go back that long, too. More than 6,000 miles of pipe run through New York’s five boroughs, carrying the natural gas that in turn provides 65% of the heat used by city residents. And the average age of that pipe, according to a report from the Center for an Urban Future, is 56 years old, much of it made of old materials that are more prone to leaks.
If the average age of the pipes is 50, that means some are close to new, and some are about 100 years old. "The notion of a natural gas system without any leaks is laughable to experts," says Time's article.

This is a problem that is prevalent. It's likely ConEd knew about it for decades -- and did nothing. ConEd's prices (rates) are set by the state regulator. See, for example, Order Setting Electric Rates (Issued and Effective April 24, 2009). At its simplest, the rate that ConEd charges customers = RATE BASE x (1 + COST OF CAPITAL). There is no profit provision, but there is a provision for paying dividends to equity owners and also for paying interest to creditors. Con Ed's Cost of Capital is 7.79%, so its rates equal the RATE BASE x 1.0779. The utility can save money by simply not replacing parts of its network.

But ConEd's not the only local utility that's harming Harlem.

Verizon

Like ConEd, Verizon's also ripping off Harlem by combining high prices and low maintenance.

According to the Daily News, "Verizon customers in East Harlem who have been without telephone service since early February say the mega-company is trying to force them to dump their outdated traditional copper-cable landlines for the new fiber-optic lines and fancy features." Translation: Verizon doesn't want to repair the copper. Instead, it wants Harlem customers to pay high prices for a service that will stop working during a power outage, and to pay for features they don't want, need, or use.

In poor areas across the US, the phone company is not repairing phone service when it breaks. In many areas that theoretically have phone service, the telephone is mostly useless because the lines have not been repaired for year. Bruce Kushnick, writing for HuffPo, wrote in January, "the year 2013 will be remembered as the year that, for the first time in telecommunications history, an incumbent utility phone company, Verizon, decided to not repair the customers' wires after a major storm."

Verizon's been skimping on repairs for years. See, for example, N.Y. Pub. Serv. Comm'n, Case 10-C-0202, Order Directing Verizon New York Inc. to File a Revised Service Quality Improvement Plan at 3 (June 22, 2010): "Beginning in the summer of 2008, Verizon's timeliness of repair performance fell short of the threshold levels defined in the Commission's service standards."

In some parts of the city (and across New York State), Verizon is eliminating phone lines and replacing them with something called VoiceLink, which appears to be a 1990s era analog cellular phone. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), the union, has done important work in exposing Verizon's treatment of minorities. Last year, the CWA told the state regulator:

Verizon dispatched employees to install VoiceLink as replacement service to all 81 units of a building at 308 E. 8th St. in lower Manhattan, but the elderly residents of the building insisted that VoiceLink not be installed after learning that it would not support their LifeAlert health monitoring equipment. To CWA’s knowledge, the building remains without phone service at the present time. There have also been a limited number of installations in the Hudson Valley area to customers who were not aware of the limitations of VoiceLink service. Verizon has also installed VoiceLink on a limited basis in the Boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.
308 E. 8th St. is Casa Victoria Housing for the Elderly, which is Section 202 housing for poor elderly people. Verizon cut off their LifeAlert in order to save money.
Verizon needs the money. GigaOm noted that it recently closed a $130 billion purchase of the rest of Verizon Wireless from UK's Vodafone.

It issued a record-breaking $49 billion in debt. The poor and the elderly have to pay their part of that debt. U.S. cellular customers already pay prices so high that Vodafone's rights to half the profits of Verizon Wireless' 114 million customers were worth more than the remaining 350 million Vodafone customers worldwide. "Though Verizon Wireless proportionately only accounted for about 50 million of Vodafone’s nearly 400 million global customers, the joint venture actually took in more money than all of Vodafone’s global operations combined," noted GigaOm.

But that's not all. As Markos noted recently, the phone companies have taken hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies (including tax breaks) to deliver broadband to areas they don't intend to serve. Nevertheless, ALEC is making sure that nobody else will be allowed to serve those areas, either, a strategy that mostly harms poor people.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/15/1285021/-They-re-Letting-Harlem-Rot

[JimDandy]

1. k n r

[Overseas]

2. Sad K&R.

[jwirr]

3. The PTB have been letting Harlem and other core city areas go to rot since the 80s. and even before

that. When jobs moved out of the cities for the suburbs is when it really began. This is where CCC programs would help a lot. Pay residents of rundown areas to fix up their own areas. I also think that something like revenue sharing paid for by taxing the rich would be a good idea to help this situation.

[MADem]

4. Verizon isn't just screwing over Harlem--they're screwing the nation.

They want to get out of the landline business.

Mantoloking is one of the first places in the country where the traditional phone line is going dead. For now, Verizon, the country's second-largest landline phone company, is taking the lead by replacing phone lines with wireless alternatives. But competitors including AT&T have made it clear they want to follow. It's the beginning of a technological turning point, representing the receding tide of copper-wire landlines that have been used since commercial service began in 1877.

The bottom line, apparently:

There's numerous reasons for wanting their DSL services to die off, including the fact that newer LTE technology is cheaper to deploy in rural areas and easier to keep upgraded. But one of the larger driving forces is that Verizon is eager to eliminate unions from their equation, given that Verizon Wireless is non union. None of this is theory; in fact it has been made very clear by Verizon executives.

"Every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper," Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam recently told attendees of an investor conference. "We are going to just take it out of service. Areas that are more rural and more sparsely populated, we have got LTE built that will handle all of those services and so we are going to cut the copper off there."

It's happening all over:

The massive telecommunications company Verizon is proposing a new system, Voice Link, to replace the old systems of copper wiring strung throughout rural America…and sidestepping the fiber optics systems many were long ago promised. But instead of receiving accolades, or even acceptance, the Verizon proposal’s been met with concern, outright rejection, and the threat of lawsuits and fines. Which in turn has pushed Verizon into a defensive crouch, of sorts.

In late June, New York State Attorney general Eric Schneiderman filed a petition alleging that Verizon was directing its technicians in the Catskills to install Voice Link rather than repair existing wireline networks whenever a seasonal customer seeking to restart service experienced connection issues. The charges were similar to ones made after Hurricane Sandy devastated phone lines on Fire Island, and the state Public Services Commission allowed Verizon to try out its new Voice Link technology there as an experiment…and found the system lacking.

Voice Link is basically a wireless service that utilizes regional boxes and the airwaves to transmit signal. Schneiderman has stated that he believes Verizon’s push to get out of its traditional copper networks is causing it to violate a decades-old pact that the nation’s largest telcos signed allowing them near-exclusive franchises in exchange for basic universal service.

“Verizon’s provision of Voice Link outside the confines of western Fire Island is illegal, and its open defiance of the Commission’s May 16 order must be met with effective sanctions,” Schneiderman wrote on June 26 in his petition. “By connecting customers outside western Fire Island with Voice Link, Verizon knowingly violated a commission order and should be fined $100,000 per day for each violation, until the violation is corrected.”...

They are fighting this in NJ as well:

Bob Master, political and legislative director for District One of the Communications Workers of America, said Verizon’s move to convert some areas to wireless is a move to get out of less profitable markets. His union members work for Verizon.

“They are interested in providing high-quality services where it is most profitable to them,’’ Master said, referring to the company’s FiOS system where customers bundle together Internet, telephone, and TV programming into one package. Those bundled offerings are 10 or more times expensive than the basic service used by more than 1 million customers in the state.

[marble falls]

5. It can't be developed until they get 'those' people out, y'know. Funny how every stategy harms...

the poor.

[butterfly77]

6. K&R..