By RICHARD SKOLNIK
White Rock

The County has handled the risks of the “Route 4 Water Pipe/Cable Project” in a manner that appears to show considerable disregard for the citizens of Los Alamos County.

The County has known since the early development of the project that it could lead to substantial and repeated internet and telephone outages. During the planning stages of the work, therefore, the County should have developed a mitigation plan to keep to a minimum the impact of any outages.

This plan should have included an assessment of the economic impact of any outages under a number of scenarios. It should also have included a review of cost-effective approaches to minimizing these economic costs.

This plan should also have taken account of the views of stakeholders, such as the Chamber of Commerce, the schools, healthcare providers, community organizations, and other members of the community.

Of course, any mitigation plan would also have to be widely disseminated within the County, using a variety of available media. This would aim at ensuring that community members could understand – in advance of and during construction – the risks of outages, how the County, the owner of the existing cable, and the contractor would respond to them, and how individuals might respond to them.

Sadly, the County has been incompletely meeting the above needs in response to outages, rather than in anticipation of them.

These outages have enormous economic consequences for real businesses and real people in Los Alamos County. The County needs to handle them in a much more rigorous manner. We can’t act as if fire were the only risk that needs serious planning in advance of an event. We shouldn’t find out during an emergency that the County’s emergency radio station only produces static in White Rock. In addition, does the County really believe that in the present “bureaucratic environment” it can count on The Department of Homeland Security to provide emergency communications for us?

The handling of the outages to date reflects poorly on the County staff and the County Council. I hope others will join me in demanding that the County upgrade the manner in which it handles risks to our community that go beyond fire.

The above are my personal views and do not represent the views of any institution with which I am or have been affiliated.