PG
&
amp;E needs an official reprimand and Gilroy’s swimming pools
should open the gates
Whew! At last, the South Valley seems to be on the downside of the incredible heat wave that has baked the Bay Area and the entire state with triple-digit temperatures for a week and a half and hit record levels over the weekend.
Whew! It comes just in time for the Gilroy Garlic Festival, and that is a huge relief to the organizers and volunteers of the community’s annual stinking rose celebration.
But for folks who wanted to seek relief from the recent seemingly endless and nearly unbearable heat, an open public pool in Gilroy was hard to find. With weekday hours only and open swim times limited, for too many hours during this heat wave, the only option for folks without access to a private pool who wanted to beat the heat with a quick dip was to travel to Morgan Hill’s aquatic center.
Gilroy’s leaders should seize the opportunity to change that – and it needn’t involve building an expensive, budget-busting aquatic center as our neighbors to the north did. We just need to better manage the pools run by public agencies in Gilroy.
Officials from the city of Gilroy, Gavilan Community College and the Gilroy Unified School District should be able to come up with a flexible plan to expand public pool hours not only during heat waves, but for the entire summer.
And when the temperatures really climb, those pool hours should be expanded. Meteorology can tell us with remarkable accuracy what the weather’s going to be like over the next seven days. Over the summer months, these agencies should monitor forecasts and when conditions warrant – for example, when temperatures topping 90 are predicted for three consecutive weekdays, or over a weekend – the hours for open swimming should be expanded.
And while we’re on the hot topic, there are two other suggestions we’d like to make.
First, Gilroy police officials assign community service officers to partner with social service agencies that work with elderly, shut-in and medically fragile residents to check on them during periods with dangerous temperatures.
Second, the Gilroy City Council should vote to send PG&E and the state Public Utilities Commission an official letter expressing deep dissatisfaction with the power company’s abysmal response to the power outages caused by the heat. The lack of communication with residents, businesses and the public via the media should serve as a Business 101 lesson in utter failure. Power is expensive, and PG&E needs to overhaul its response to critical situations so that it doesn’t compare to FEMA’s response after Hurricane Katrina.
