I survived the evil Hurricane Isabel with nary a scratch, secreted away as I was in my apartment, that Fortress of Solitude that I like to call the Car Barn.

Honestly, it’s kind of hard to get excited about the latest “storm of the century” when your apartment building consists of an entire city block of brick and mortar. I understand that out in the hinterlands, a population of perhaps seven million people are still without water or electricity, but for my part, Isabel was nothing more than a bad thunderstorm. There was a particularly frightful moment on Friday morning when the television scren went black and I thought the power had gone out, but it was just the DVD player switching from disc two to disc three. I breathed a sigh of relief and resumed my viewing of the Dune mini-series.

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to their plight, but judging from Patagonia’s latest sales figures, many people in DC’s outer suburbs were probably hoping for a reason to get back to nature — although in all fairness they were probably thinking of a weekend of car camping in the Shenandoah, and not a ten day sojourn to country living, circa 1865.

I can credit my easy ride to Capitol Hill’s underground power lines, which obviously do not exist in the outer reaches. The reason of course, is money. Underground power lines are terrifically expensive to install and require a huge investment in infrastructure. Those people who would benefit most of the reliability of an underground power grid — suburban families with small children — are the same people who would refuse the property tax hike which would be required to build such a reliable system.

The East Coast has seen three major power grid failures in the past three months; Isabel, the New England/Canada grid failure (which was causing by a single unpowered fuse), and the little reported Memphis outage. These should trigger a national conversation about the country’s crumbling infrastructure, and a commitment from the Bush and future adminstrations to investigate and over-haul a seriously overtaxed system. What we will be treated to instead is a few pitiful weeks of overblow coverage by the national media, and then a yawning silence, as localities reject the tax increases necessary to rebuild the system. People want reliability, but they don’t want to pay for it.

But like the man said, “If you don’t want to pay for reliability, you’ll eventually pay for un-reliability”.