Johnstown’s Showcase for Commerce gave a true representation of the area tonight when the whole thing ground to a halt as the power went off at about 8 p.m. and remained off as I type this – thankfully not in an affected area – at 10-ish.
If those Afghan refugees had made it here as planned by the Lack of Vision 2025 behind-the-curtain elites, they’d have felt right at home.
My brother often would say, as he and my mother sat awaiting the return of power in Lorain Borough over the past 10 years or so, that he knew what it was like to live in Kabul or Baghdad (Iraq).
Tonight he’s living downtown, still in the dark.
There had been reports on the police scanner (my wife loves to listen) in recent days about manhole lids blowing off and smoke emanating from the uncapped holes in downtown Johnstown. Early reports are that this outage is an underground phenomenon.
Guess no one took those flying manhole lids seriously.
Yes, other localities in Pennsylvania, and other states such as California and Texas, have creaky electrical grids as the nation’s infrastructure continues to deteriorate.
But here in Johnstown we have an embarrassment of failures on the infrastructure front.
Our roads look like some of the main highways in Ukraine now that the Russians have bombed them into uselessness.
Definition of a Johnstown optimist: Someone who bothers to get a front-end alignment for their cars, which on our roads has the life expectancy of the mayfly.
Those very same roads, particularly within Johnstown’s city limits, are a treat in winter. The plan for snow removal is waiting for the stuff to melt and run into the rivers.
This makes parking, traveling the roads, and even trying to walk the sidewalks an adventure.
Point Stadium has been upgraded through the years, but somehow they forgot to deal with the lights, which could be counted on to fail for major events such as the AAABA Tournament. There are rumors the system was personally designed by Edison, whose autograph might be seen deep within the stadium’s bowels.
Now, at long last, supposedly the lights have been updated. We shall see.
The ongoing, seemingly never-ending example of Greater Johnstown’s infrastructure problems is the sewer work.
The sewer authority looked the other way for years if not decades, then got hit square between the eyes with a federal mandate to deal with overflows during rain storms that dumped untreated waste water into the Conemaugh River.
In the intervening years, homeowners in some municipalities have had to shell out thousands of dollars to make their systems airtight in the attempts to eliminate rainwater inflows.
Some, like Southmont Borough in which I reside, thought just upgrading laterals to near the foundation of each home would cut the mustard. We would pay higher rates, of course, to fund this, but now apparently we are not meeting standards so some of my neighbors are having to have their basements torn up and airtight piping installed, along with paying the higher rates!
Some lucky people now have sewer backups where before they had none, sort of like winning the Murphy’s Law lottery.
I like this area, and have lived here all my life, but you’d have to be blind not to see how things have gone downhill dramatically in the past decade or so.
And I haven’t even mentioned the violent crime, which may have gotten a boost without lighting in the downtown for these past several hours.
Sam Ross Jr's site 