Category Archives: Infrastructure

December 26, 2021

Puerto Rico Power Grid (Video)

Posted on December 26, 2021 by ifnm| Comments Off on Puerto Rico Power Grid (Video)

Puerto Rico has dealt with its share of disasters in recent years. You may know its entire energy grid also qualifies as something of a disaster. Now, despite billions of U.S. tax dollars, there’s concern the system is on the verge of a total collapse, prompting the U.S. territory to declare a state of emergency.

Hurricanes Maria and Irma destroyed most of Puerto Rico’s power system in 2017. But it wasn’t much to begin with.

Manuel Laboy: Maria was essentially a huge wake up call.

Manuel Laboy heads up the island’s Central Office for Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency.

Sharyl: You’ve had many hurricanes before, but that was the one that seemed to really trigger this realization that we’d better fix all of this.

Laboy: So it is kind of a blessing in disguise, certainly. The silver lining opportunity is that we went through a very, very tough time. It cost us a lot, including lives, and moving forward, looking forward, now we have the chance to address something that we knew that 20 years ago, 30 years ago, it’s something that we needed to address.

With Puerto Rico in bankruptcy, a financial oversight board approved hiring an American-Canadian consortium called LUMA Energy to deliver on the island’s energy makeover. The company took the reins June 1st.

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Posted in Carribean, Infrastructure

August 29, 2021

Victor Davis Hanson: America’s resilience and its resources are not infinite. Can it still work?

Posted on August 29, 2021 by ifnm| Comments Off on Victor Davis Hanson: America’s resilience and its resources are not infinite. Can it still work?

There are repercussions when ideology governs policy or when we take for granted the basics of life to pursue its trappings.

For nearly two years, Americans have engaged in a great woke experiment of cannibalizing themselves. American civilization has invested massive labor, capital and time in an effort to constantly flagellate itself for not being perfect. 

Yet America’s resilience and its resources are not infinite. We are now beginning to see the consequences of what happens when premodern tribalism absorbs Americans.

There are repercussions when ideology governs policy or when we take for granted the basics of life to pursue its trappings.

Who cares whether the blow-dried media is woke if it cannot report the truth and keep politicians honest? Once journalists became progressive poodles rather than the watchdogs of government, the Biden administration had no fear of audit. It took for granted that its disasters, from the southern border to the chaos in Afghanistan, would be excused by toady reporters. 

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Posted in Infrastructure, Victor Davis Hanson

October 14, 2019

PG&E’s Big Blackout Is Only the Beginning (Video)

Posted on October 14, 2019 by ifnm| Comments Off on PG&E’s Big Blackout Is Only the Beginning (Video)

California utilities are poised to continue shutting off power to limit liabilities and prevent further wildfire deaths.

PG&E Corp.’s decision to shut off power to more than two million Californians this week represents a new reality: It now plans to pull the plug as a desperation measure whenever its equipment threatens to spark destructive and potentially deadly wildfires.

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Posted in California Story, Fires and Arson, Infrastructure

February 9, 2018

Victor Davis Hanson 2017 – The Civic Cost of Illegal Immigration (Video)

Posted on February 9, 2018 by ifnm| Comments Off on Victor Davis Hanson 2017 – The Civic Cost of Illegal Immigration (Video)

Victor Davis Hanson examines how permissive attitudes towards illegal immigration undermine respect for the rule of law and traditional notions of citizenship.

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Posted in Infrastructure, Victor Davis Hanson

How Easy Money Is Rotting America from the Inside-Out

Posted on February 9, 2018 by ifnm| Comments Off on How Easy Money Is Rotting America from the Inside-Out

How much of our gleaming new infrastructure will fall into disrepair?

The Federal Reserve has been the main cause of business cycles in America since 1913. For several decades, it has tried to hide the consequences of its policies by enabling easy credit during each recession. As Jonathan Newman wrote yesterday, pouring trillions of dollars into the financial sector obscures the external signs of the recession such as low asset prices and high unemployment and promotes economic malinvestment.

This malinvestment creates the conditions that cause the next recession. Some of the consequences of the Fed’s policies, such as stock market and housing bubbles can be directly attributed to its policies. In other cases, the artificially low interest rates and other “easy money” policies foster an “infrastructure rot” that erodes the efficiency of the American economy, the standard of living of consumers, and eats away at American infrastructure. These effects are difficult to trace back to the Fed’s policies, so let’s concretize some examples to understand how Federal Reserve policies affect America.

At the city level, low interest rates allow cities to fund new public projects such as parks and bridges. While this may seem fine and dandy, all infrastructure projects have a maintenance cost. It’s not sufficient to build a park. One must also have the money to maintain it every year. If there is not enough revenue to pay for maintenance, the park will literally rot until the playgrounds fall apart, the lawns are overgrown, the lights fail, and the park becomes too dangerous for families to play in.

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Posted in Infrastructure

December 28, 2017

Tom Cotton: ‘Not Nativist’ to Want Immigration Policy ‘Crafted to Benefit American Citizens, Not Foreigners’

Posted on December 28, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Tom Cotton: ‘Not Nativist’ to Want Immigration Policy ‘Crafted to Benefit American Citizens, Not Foreigners’

The leading voice in the U.S. Senate to reduce immigration levels, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), says it is “not a ‘nativist view” to want a national immigration policy that benefits American citizens, rather than foreign nationals.

In a series of posts via Twitter, Cotton slammed a New York Times report for being biased against President Trump’s pro-American immigration agenda and favoring an immigration policy that puts foreign nationals first.

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Posted in Infrastructure

December 26, 2017

Indian National to Be Deported After Profiting $20M by Fraudulently Importing H-1B Foreign Workers

Posted on December 26, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Indian National to Be Deported After Profiting $20M by Fraudulently Importing H-1B Foreign Workers

An Indian national who pocketed $20 million by fraudulently importing foreign workers through the H-1B visa program to the U.S. will be deported after he completes time in federal prison.

Raju Kosuri, a 45-year-old Indian-born U.S. resident, pleaded guilty to operating a cheap labor business where he brought nearly 1,000 foreign workers to the U.S. on the H-1B visa through fraudulent applications, according to the Washington Post.

Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. That number has ballooned to potentially hundreds of thousands each year, as universities and non-profits are exempt from the cap. With more entering the U.S. through the visa, Americans are often replaced and forced to train their foreign replacements.

Kosuri used his fraud foreign-importing business to bring his wife, 46-year-old Smriti Jharia, to the U.S. on a fraudulent H-1B visa. The two are the parents of an “anchor baby,” the term used to describe a U.S.-born child who is given birthright citizenship despite their parents being foreign nationals.

Kosuri was supposed to be given a tougher sentence, but U.S. District Judge ­Leonie M. Brinkema passed down a mere 28 months for the massive fraud scheme after she said there were issues with the prosecution’s case. When Kosuri completes the sentence, he and his wife, along with their anchor baby, will be deported from the U.S.

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Posted in Employment, Fraud, Infrastructure, Law & Courts

October 13, 2017

PG&E power lines linked to Wine Country fires

Posted on October 13, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on PG&E power lines linked to Wine Country fires

PG&E and other large utilities in California have a long history of being found responsible for major wildfires because of inadequate maintenance of their power lines.

As the first reports came in Sunday night of numerous fires that would grow into one of the most destructive wildfire disasters in California history, emergency dispatchers in Sonoma County received multiple calls of power lines falling down and electrical transformers exploding.

In all, according to a review of emergency radio traffic by the Bay Area News Group, Sonoma County dispatchers sent out fire crews to at least 10 different locations across the county over a 90-minute period starting at 9:22 pm to respond to 911 calls and other reports of sparking wires and problems with the county’s electrical system amid high winds.

State fire officials said Tuesday that they are still investigating the cause of the blazes, which as of late Tuesday had killed 17 people and destroyed more than 2,000 homes in Sonoma, Napa and other Northern California counties.

But the reports of the power equipment failures began to turn the spotlight on PG&E, the giant San Francisco-based utility, raising questions about how well it maintained its equipment in the area and whether it adequately cut back trees from power lines to reduce fire risk — as required by state law.

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Posted in California Story, Fires and Arson, Infrastructure

October 3, 2017

How the Democrats Set Up Puerto Rico for Disaster

Posted on October 3, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on How the Democrats Set Up Puerto Rico for Disaster

What New Orleans, Houston and Puerto Rico have in common.

We’ve seen this show before.

When there’s a national disaster, neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, shelters are filled with crying families, and a Republican is in the White House, the Democrats jump into action.

Not to help, but to make political capital from a disaster that they helped cause.

After Hurricane Katrina, the media shrieked that survivors inside the New Orleans Superdome were murdering each other. But there actually wasn’t a single murder in the Superdome. And no, NBC’s Brian Williams, never saw any corpses floating past the Ritz-Carlton. The media exaggerated and lied.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was all over the news shouting, “Get off your asses” and accusing the Bush administration of “spinning” while “people are dying”. The dirty Democrat demanded more resources while claiming that everything that the Federal government was doing wasn’t good enough. He called for Greyhound buses, when there were plenty of school buses in New Orleans that weren’t being used.

Much of the disaster was actually Nagin’s fault. And Ray Nagin has been convicted of his crimes.

Puerto Rico is the new New Orleans. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz is the new Nagin.

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Posted in Democrats/Progressives, Infrastructure, Radicals

September 25, 2017

Facing Months in the Dark, Ordinary Life in Puerto Rico Is ‘Beyond Reach’

Posted on September 25, 2017 by ifnm| Comments Off on Facing Months in the Dark, Ordinary Life in Puerto Rico Is ‘Beyond Reach’

Disaster exacerbated by corruption…

Two days after Hurricane Maria flattened this island of 3.5 million people, knocking out all its power and much of its water, the rebuilding of the services and structures needed for people to resume some semblance of ordinary life was looking more complicated by the day.

All or part of three towns in the northwestern part of the island — Isabela, San Sebastián and Quebradillas — were being evacuated Friday because of fears about structural damage to the nearby Guajataca Dam. Close to 70,000 people could be affected if the 90-year-old dam, which is 120-feet high and can hold about 11 billion gallons of water, collapsed, said Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló.

And with everyone from the governor of Puerto Rico to the mayor of San Juan predicting that it could take four to six months to resume electrical service, people were contemplating empty refrigerators, campfire cooking, bathing in their own sweat and perhaps wrangling for fresh water on an island accustomed to hard times but nothing like what the future may bring.

“It’s been hard to see infrastructure deteriorate in Puerto Rico, but it has been harder to meet citizens who have lost it all,” Governor Rosselló said.

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Posted in Carribean, Infrastructure, Weather