It seems FPL cleaned up the downed power lines yesterday, but has revised its estimate to turn on all the power in the area to Tuesday. We’ll see if Coral Gables goes through with its threat to impose fines.
I was out for a brief drive to the library today (Comcast still hasn’t fixed the internet, and the library has wifi) and saw a lot of electricity trucks working in the area. Hard to know, but maybe that letter from the Commission had an effect; or maybe it’s just our turn.
In this resolution the City of Coral Gables purports to order Florida Power & Light to restore our electricity by Sunday night on pain of … wait for it … $500/day fines if it doesn’t (plus the some dubious threat of additional higher fines under state law).
Does a city have the power to order a state-regulated utility to restore power by a set date after a hurricane? Given the relationship between cities and the State of Florida, I’d be a little surprised if the answer were yes, at least in the absence of clearly dilatory or unreasonable behavior, although I am certainly not an expert in local government law. The resolution cites two authorities: § 2-203 of the Coral Gables code and Florida Statutes § 162.09. The Coral Gables code section is about cease and desist letters:
Sec. 2-203. – Penalty for failure to obey cease and desist letter.
(a) The city attorney is authorized to issue cease and desist letters for violation of the City Code, Zoning Code and any other applicable law where such violation causes harm to the city, its residents or its businesses.
(b) It shall be unlawful for any person or entity to disobey the demand made by the city attorney or his/her designee, on behalf of the City of Coral Gables, in a cease and desist letter.And And
(c) Failure to obey the demand made in a cease and desist letter shall result in the issuance of a code enforcement citation, punishable by a fine of $500.00 per day.
(d) A violator who has been issued a citation for failure to comply with the demand in the cease and desist letter, must elect to either comply with the demand in the letter and pay the fine or request an administrative hearing before a special master, as set forth in chapter 101, article VI, division 3 of the City Code.
(e) As a cumulative remedy, the city attorney is authorized to file a civil action to enforce the cease and desist letter, the city is entitled to an injunction and the violator is responsible for attorney’s fees and costs incurred. Such proceedings shall be expedited by the court.
(f) The city, as well as its elected and appointed officials, employees and agents are immunized from civil or criminal liability for actions taken in accordance with this section.
(g) Subsection (a) of this Code section shall be incorporated into section 2-201 of the City Code as subsection (13).
As for the state statute, I see authority for “$15,000 per violation if the code enforcement board or special magistrate finds the violation to be irreparable or irreversible in nature.” But is failure to repair quickly enough really a zoning violation? Maybe at some point yes, but a week after a hurricane? Surely there is some implicit (and in the case of the state law, fairly explicit) reasonableness limit operative here?
As to the Coral Gables ordinance, I sort of wonder how it applies–does FPL have a legal duty to the city under zoning law that is enforceable in this manner? (I honestly don’t know.) Does it make sense to talk of ‘cease and destining” from failure to deal with a public emergency? (It might.) More to the point, though, even if the legal answer is yes, can you really make FP&L do anything in these post-hurricane conditions? (Not as far as I can see.)
Perhaps prudently, therefore, the Commission’s resolution only demands that the power be back by Sunday at 11:45pm (although it demands downed power lines blocking streets be cleared today). As FP&L has publicly said it will have all the power back on the east coast of Florida by Sunday unless your house is destroyed or it would be dangerous to turn it on, at least as to the power restoration this may be more sound than fury.
Then again, I suppose there could be litigation: this is the same Coral Gables Commission that recently sued Facebook and Instagram to find out the identity of a public (and until the lawsuit, very obscure) critic. The legal theory in that case — trademark and irreparable harm to the city — was maybe tenable enough not to be risible (but I’d say on balance not even that). More to the point the suit looked to me like a SLAPP suit, and seemed very very unwise, in terrible taste, and probably outright unconstitutional.
So who knows, maybe my tax money will be spent on a suit about this too.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no love for FP&L, even if they did get my lights back on a couple of days ago. Having had no power for five weeks after Andrew, and having everything in my fridge just spoil, I understand how awful it can be to be without it — and that it is even worse for people who depend on medical equipment.
I’m all for getting tough with FP&L on solar power, on burying power lines (on which, let the record show, Coral Gables wimped out long ago), and even on harrying them to fix the power. But is this the right way to go about it? I am not convinced. FP&L may not do a great job of pre-hurricane hardening, but large-scale post-hurricane restoration is something they seem fairly good at, if only because they have practice and get massive help from out of state.
I’d much rather see Coral Gables get tough with FP&L about pre-hurricane preparedness, like burying power lines, than this post-hurricane spasm — whether it is sincere or a publicity stunt. (I should emphasize that it could be either for all I know. Normally I would call up and try to interview some Commissioners about this, which I think is the right thing to do when writing about people. But I expect that they have better things to do immediately post-Irma than talk to me and I’m not about to bother them.)
Thanks to the Washington Post, I have superimposed an image of Irma on the state of Florida.
I feel so much better now.
In an effort to avoid thinking about hurricanes, I have cut the load time of this blog by more than 50%.
I could cut it a lot more if I jettisoned the reader map in the right margin, which seems to take a long time to load. But I like the map, even if it reminds me how much traffic is down from the many thousands per month when I was taking blogging more seriously. Second slowest item is probably the trump countdown clock, which I’ve been thinking of cutting anyway. It has two problems: First, it puts the word “Trump” at the top of every page. Second, it’s almost always slow due, I suspect, to the page cache. Besides, I’m not enjoying looking at it: the numbers are too big.
Just Security, A Second Look at the Steele Dossier—Knowing What We Know Now, offers by far the best evaluation of the notorious Steele Dossier on Trump/Russian connections, possible blackmail, and more) that I have read to date.
The guest post by a former member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, John Sipher, paints the Steele Dossier as mostly but not utterly reliable:
Although the reports were produced episodically, almost erratically, over a five-month period, they present a coherent narrative of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. As a result, they offer an overarching framework for what might have happened based on individuals on the Russian side who claimed to have insight into Moscow’s goals and operational tactics. Until we have another more credible narrative, we should do all we can to examine closely and confirm or dispute the reports.
Key caveat:
I spent almost thirty years producing what CIA calls “raw reporting” from human agents. At heart, this is what Orbis did. They were not producing finished analysis, but were passing on to a client distilled reporting that they had obtained in response to specific questions. The difference is crucial, for it is the one that American journalists routinely fail to understand. When disseminating a raw intelligence report, an intelligence agency is not vouching for the accuracy of the information provided by the report’s sources and/or subsources. Rather it is claiming that it has made strenuous efforts to validate that it is reporting accurately what the sources/subsources claim has happened. The onus for sorting out the veracity and for putting the reporting in context against other reporting – which may confirm or deny the new report – rests with the intelligence community’s professional analytic cadre. In the case of the dossier, Orbis was not saying that everything that it reported was accurate, but that it had made a good-faith effort to pass along faithfully what its identified insiders said was accurate. This is routine in the intelligence business.
That said, however,
As outsiders without the investigative tools available to the FBI, we can only look at the information and determine if it makes sense given subsequent events and the revelation of additional information. Mr. Steele did not have the benefit of knowing Mr. Trump would win the election or how events might play out. In this regard, does any of the information we have learned since June 2016 assign greater or less credibility to the information? Were the people mentioned in the report real? Were their affiliations correct? Did any of the activities reported happen as predicted?
To a large extent, yes.
Read the whole thing.
Update: Uh-oh. Marcy Wheeler, who follows this stuff obsessively closely, does not agree: In The Post-Press Michael Cohen Details in the Steele Dossier she writes, “I’m doing a long response on this unfortunately terrible John Sipher post trying to calm questions about the Steele dossier.” Her comments center on the treatment of allegations relating to Trump associate Michael Cohen; she’s much more skeptical of them than is Sipher. Update3: And follows up with John Sipher’s Garbage Post Arguing the Steele Dossier Isn’t Garbage.
Update2: For yet another take on Michael Cohen’s role as an intermediary to the Russians, see Talking Points Memo, What Happened to the Michael Cohen Ukraine Dossier?.
So, what do you do if your roof comes off during a hurricane?
Presumably you can’t go anywhere, because there’s a hurricane out there. So do you hide under the table? Go sit in the car in the garage? Hide in a closet with louver doors?
Just asking for a friend.
(Couldn’t find a photo I liked of roof damage, so I went with this Wikimedia picture from the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900.)
Latest hurricane wind predictions:
Recent Bluessky Posts
Jotwell Blenderlaw
