Flighty notions
So here’s something that my state senator, Jack Scott, has been concerning himself with while California enters a new fiscal year without a budget and with a massive deficit: the horrors of mylar balloons.
Mylar balloons, it turns out, very occasionally “become enmeshed” in electricity lines and cause outages. Here’s the crisis that has my senator all charged up:
“Burbank Water & Power officials in 2007 recorded that more than 4,600 customers were affected by eight power outages, which lasted an average of 77 minutes per customer. The outages caused more than $10,000 in property damage. Though not the sole culprit, metallic balloons were found to have caused a portion of the blackouts. No metallic balloon-related outages have been reported in Burbank this year….”
In other words, there were some outages last year, but we don’t know to what degree they were caused by mylar balloons, and damage was about $10,000. This year, there are no balloon-caused outages. Clearly, this is a far more pressing issue than the state budget crisis.
The representative from the Balloon Council (no, that’s not your local city council, it’s a lobbying group) shares my doubt that this is important legislation, but Senator Scott’s spokesperson “dismissed such flippancy, contending that Mylar balloon-cased outages are a serious problem.”
“If you’re in the operating room at [Providence] St. Joseph [Medical Center] and the electricity goes out and you have to wait for backup electricity, it’s a problem,” she said. “If it’s 100 degrees out and Southern California Edison is saying we’ve got six outages and they are all Mylar balloon caused and your fridge goes out, that’s a problem. To say that’s it not a problem, is understating it.”
Perhaps. But if she’s comparing this to the potential of a power outage during surgery, may I compare the impact of police, firefighters, and code enforcers ceasing work because the state can’t pay its bills? If the state doesn’t pay its electrical bill, I doubt legislators will be able to blame the balloons.
Luckily, a compromise was managed so that the balloon imbroglio came to a happy conclusion. Instead of, in the words of my local paper The Burbank Leader, “illegalizing the sale of the shiny, metallic balloons — as the bill’s author, state Sen. Jack Scott, had intended — the compromise will now penalize sellers and distributors of the Mylar balloons up to $250.” One would think that if these electrical outages were so potentially dangerous that the balloons would be banned. But no, I guess it’s enough to fine everyone who sells them — even though the balloons are legal — and thereby let more hidden tax dollars fly off to Sacramento.