The Utility Of Blaming Con Ed

I can't help feel a bit of sympathy for the people at Con Edison as they struggle with the humongous and unenviable task of trying to keep millions of air conditioners running in this heat without any interruptions. That's in addition to the usual lights, refigerators, computers and billions of other devices in this increasingly wired world.
A news item today says a United Nations committee agrees with Al Gore, the earth is getting hotter, get used to it. That creates a vicious cycle: We're less comfortable so we need more energy to cool us which creates more pollution and more warming. Why does it seem not enough people see this as a problem? But that's for another post.
A group of Queens politicians has been having a field day calling for something just short of the public flogging of Con Ed CEO Kevin Burke because of the power outage that left thousands of homes dark for more than a week. I don't take that situation lightly (pun unintended) and many people suffered personal misery and severe economic hardship.
It may very well be that Burke or someone in his chain of command was asleep at the switch and that's what led to the crisis. But the rush to judgment is staggering. The Queens pols make the valid point that the company was initially slow in assessing the problem. But given that the company, under the harshest public scrutiny, still can't account for what happened, unless there is a major coverup, the utility is clearly dealing with something that never happened before.
The problem with the unpredictable is that, by nature, there is no way to plan for it. That's why 9-11 was effective and devastating. No one except the warped minds of the terrorists could conceive of such a plan beforehand, much less stave it off.
In the case of this blackout and the others that will very likely come in the future as we strain the grid to the breaking point, the priority is to get facts and analyze them. There's plenty of time for blame later. Imagine a ship that's taking on water and the entire crew scrambling to figure out whose job it was to check for water and how to punish him, rather than first plugging the leak.
We're in a crisis not too different than that now, with our lives now so completely dependent on electricity. The last thing we need is to draw the focus of the people whose jobs it is to keep the power on away from that job, to worry instead about whose going to be yelling at them when things go wrong.