The best electric utility money can buy?

When others start to pile on about road disrepair in L.A., I tend to withhold comment because I’ve lived in cities with deeper bureaucratic swamps and worse taxpayer accountability in this department.

In Chicago, street maintenance took place during rush hour as a rule, not the exception. Massive potholes and jagged asphalt formations stood unaddressed for years, killing tires and injuring alignments. Tales of city workers sleeping on the job in their utility trucks were common. Tractor-trailers would slam into freeway overpasses with mislabeled clearances, resulting in lane closures and hours of cleanup. The idea that freeway construction could be done in the wee morning hours had never crossed the minds of most natives.

This isn’t to say that Los Angeles and CalTrans can’t improve; of course they can, but I would argue that on balance, L.A. is well-paved and maintenance schedules are commuter-friendly. When it comes to infrastructure issues, we have a much larger problem that requires immediate attention.

As I blog from a Hollywood café, my house enters its seventh hour without electricity. Los Angeles is the only place I’ve lived where I can expect to lose power to my house, on average, three to four times a year.

Chicago goes from unbearably hot to miserably cold, and despite many feet of snow dumping on the ground each year, the power manages to stay on. In L.A., we get one rain or wind storm and lose power for an entire day.

To make matters worse, DWP does a poor job of status reporting. To obtain a recorded update on the outage, one must spend nearly five minutes navigating touch-tone menus. Why is this status message not played before anything else, and why does DWP not publish an update on its website?

Okay, enough trick questions. Here’s one that someone out there should be able to answer: why can’t DWP keep the power on?

*Midnight update: Still no power, and I am now completely outraged over the situation. I have a refrigerator full of spoiled food, a day of lost productivity, and when I call DWP, I get a recorded message explaining that all available crews are working as "quickly and safely as possible."

Memo to DWP: I frankly don't care about how well your employees are abiding by union rules as I sit here in the 17th century surrounded by flickering candles. I want to hear a layman's explanation of what the Hell happened, and that you guys are risking life and limb to get it fixed.

The entire neighborhood is completely dark and each one of these houses is a prime target for crime. This is completely unacceptable.

*4 a.m. update: After 14 hours, power is finally restored, just in time for the sunrise over Baghdad, California.