Power Poles Kill?
I was traveling out west on Saturday down Richmond rd at Glendenning (Blacktown) and saw these signs…
I’ve seen these signs before, but now I have photo evidence of perhaps the dumbest poster campaign EVER.
The photos aren’t real good quality but they read “POWER POLES KILL” and “BURY CABLES NOT PEOPLE”.
Now I’m not Dr Power Poles or anything… but the last time I checked, power poles don’t really kill people… People driving cars into stationary power poles kill people… People who throw other people off power poles kill people… But power poles actively killing people…? I don’t think so… Unless of course there are indeed some psychopathic power poles out there that lurk the streets at night waiting to jump out in front of unsuspecting cars… that is a possibility… Maybe the people behind these posters know something I don’t?
But hey… Everyone is allowed to have a hobby horse, and maybe these guys are right… Maybe the government should spend the next 30 years inconveniencing the public and spending billions of dollars digging up streets and footpaths and under houses so that we don’t have big stationary objects to crash our cars into? And while they’re at it, maybe they could remove all the trees near the road too… so that we don’t drive into them. And maybe they could bull doze any other large stationary objects that people have to go out of their way to hit… like… say… houses? Traffic lights? Street lights? Post boxes? Street signs?
Yeah that sounds like a good use of money…
Maybe these campaigners will be happy if we turned the world into a desert so there’s no other stationary objects for miles that might kill us…
DUMB.
January 13th, 2009 at 10:13 am
OK, now we have conflict…
I actually think that it’s a good idea (in theory). I hate power poles, I think that they’re quite ugly, and they are potentially very dangerous for (admittedly already out of control) drivers. I definitely see your point about trees, houses, national monuments etc, and yes, of course they’re also potential hazards, but I actually see power poles as unnecessary hazards that don’t have to be there.
Having said all that, I agree that it would cost way too much to remove them all, but perhaps when setting up future power grids the lines could be buried instead of put up on massive poles alongside roads.
The word ‘hazard’ also made me think of Gareth’s OH&S training session in The Office, where he put a coffee cup on top of a computer and asked the girl whether it was ‘safe or unsafe’, then couldn’t think of an alternative location once she’d answered.
January 13th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Yep, I’m not saying that they shouldn’t bury them in future developments – they should – but it is a complete waste of money and resources to start a program of removing existing power poles…
For example: they removed the power poles in Norton st Leichhardt and buried the cables (and it looks great) but it took them more than 2 years to do one street (and only the business end!!) and still there are plenty of large stationary objects that one might crash their vehicle into and be killed.