Best Laid Plans
It seems that I recall hearing something recently about how, due to escalating fuel costs, the US may begin experiencing “rolling brownouts,” that is, random regional power outages. I’m not sure if I heard this, or saw it on TV, or read it on the internet. Whichever way I got it, I am pretty sure there was a light on at the time.
Now, give that same news to a resident of Saipan, and they would just give you a look that says “…and your point is?”
Saipan, an island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CMNI) and a US protectorate, is no stranger to the rolling brownout phenomenon. They have been dealing with it for years. It is no rarity to go for a nighttime drive around the island and suddenly come upon neighborhoods that appear to have all failed to pay their electric bill.
Now, being that this is Saipan, that could be a distinct possibility, but the more likely explanation is that the island power plant is running at full capacity and can’t produce any more juice, so someone has to go without for a couple of hours. It seems the only way to avoid this phenomenon is to live on a ship, buy a generator, or call to make arrangements to move in with the governor, if his phone hasn’t been cut off.
I can just imagine a Chamorro version of Scotty from “Star Trek,” jamming the intercom button with a meaty finger and telling the plant manager “I’m giving it all she’s got, Captain, any more and she’ll blow!”
When I look around Saipan, I am often reminded of Colorado Springs, Colorado, where I lived for 15 years before moving east to Appomattox. At one time, the Springs was a charming and well-organized town. But then the city fathers gave carte blanche to developers, allowing them to spread the town hither and yon and before you you knew it, you had such sprawl that it was like someone took 15 or 20 small towns and just jammed them together in one space.
There was no “bad side” of town, there were bad sides of neighborhoods. You enjoyed the shops and restaurants of one neighborhood, then locked your car doors and raced until you got to the next neighborhood and its enjoyable sights, then lock doors and raced, ad infinitum…until you finally ended up in either Denver or Pueblo, where you NEVER unlocked the doors.
Saipan likewise puts in resorts and shopping for the whole family, whom you must then race from the resort to the shopping past dozens of, for want of a better term, “happy ending” massage parlors and seedy clubs featuring ladies in various stage of disrobery. Then more shopping, more debauchery and so the cycle repeats itself until you look to take your brood back to the Hyatt and call for a taxi, preferably one with dirty windows so you don’t have to look at all of it again.
To its credit, Saipan is working hard to correct this, but it’s going to take time and times are tight, particularly for an economy that depends heavily on tourist dollars which, with the high cost of fuel, aren’t quite rolling in at the same rate.
There used to be a somewhat thriving garment industry, until the factory owners decided that Saipan was “no longer a conducive business environment.” Which means the people working in them six days a week, 12 hours a day, started asking to be paid a living wage so they could move out of the company housing hovels which, had the garment workers been prisoners of war, would have been in violation of the Geneva Convention.
So they are gone. Think of that while you lace up your Nikes. And please, if you are going to develop, do so wisely, even if it requires taking drastic measures. Like planning.
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