Pipelines before hospitals

There's been an undercurrent topic on several of the left blogs about a decision made in Mississippi to task power/electrical workers to return power to the Colonial Pipeline which supplies gasoline to a fair portion of the southeast. The part of the decision which has been highlighted is that in order to do this, power company workers were tasked away from restoring power to hospitals for a day or two, and in one case had to cut power to a working hospital for 24 hours.

I didn't make much of it as it seems a priority choice despite the inflammatory hospitals edge.

But there's something VERY interesting in all this that Josh Marshall found in the coverage of this decision.

Dan Jordan, manager of Southern Pines Electric Power Association, said Vice President Dick Cheney's office called and left voice mails twice shortly after the storm struck, saying the Collins substations needed power restored immediately.

And Marshall's comments:

Cheney's office wouldn't talk. They referred the reporter to DHS. And they wouldn't talk either. .....

This is also pretty early in the crisis, August 30th, the day after the storm hit. The Veep's office seemed really proactive about getting that pipeline flowing again. I trust it won't seem too persnickety to note a certain contrast between the urgency of this response and that to the rest of the crisis in the region?

Okay, just for debate, I think that maybe that pipeline was pretty damned important in the national recovery from Katrina. But don't you find the intervention of the Vice President's office, around any and all established disaster chains of command, into a local power company interesting?