From Rich Galen’s Mullings today:

· The North American Energy Reliability Council which tracks such things has determined that, including last week, there have been seven grid failures since the big one on November 9, 1965.

· None lasted for more than a day.

· Let’s go to the blackboard…

· The number of days between November 8, 1965 and August 14, 2003 is 13,793.

· The number of days in which some portion of the national power grid failed during that period is 7.

· Dividing 13,793 by 7 we get 0.000507504

· Moving the decimal two places to the right (and rounding up) we get a failure rate of 51 THOUSANTHS of one percent.

· Stating it the other way, the power grid (which was described by former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson as being like one in a “third world country”) has been up 99.949 percent of the time over the past 37 years.