Last week was another stormy night in Ulster County, another morning without electricity. And calls for another investigation into Central Hudson.

The previous Sunday night’s outages from a storm which CH admits was a lot more than anybody had forecast or they had planned for added insult to injury to Wawarsing residents (and beyond) who had just gone through this the week prior.

There are already probably a half-dozen complaints filed by various public officials against Central Hudson. One of them being County Exec Pat Ryan, who made that point and others as he was lifted into the air by a bucket truck in his new congressional campaign commercial, released a little over 24 hours after the latest outages. (Information was not immediately available as to whether this commercial was filmed last week after Outages Outrage II or this week after Outages Outrage III.)

“For too long, big corporations have had too much power and too much say at the expense of New York families," Ryan tells the viewer while ascending skyward. "It’s outrageous and unacceptable — while most of us are struggling to pay our bills, put food on the table, and keep the lights on, big corporations like Central Hudson are making record profits.” The stock of CH parent company Fortis, like all stocks, is down a bit of late but has risen just a little less than 700 percent since 2001.

The utility, which spends what looks like a lot of money marketing its corporate concern, excellence and overall goodness to us, is having its worst PR year ever with its grid problems and its billing chaos. At this point, Central Hudson must look with envy at Joe Biden’s approval ratings and ask, “How does he stay so popular?” In its corner, though, is Patrick Sheehan, the GOP nominee for Assembly who will face Sarahana Shrestha at the polls. He posted on his campaign Facebook page a meme. The photo was of two workers working on a utility pole. The caption: “The Most Valuable Linemen in America Are Not in the NFL.”

Outages Outrage I was of course in the wake of February’s off-the-charts ice storm, which was worse in terms of destruction than either of this month’s problem. We’ll let you all provide your own answer to the question of whether it’s worse to have no heat when it’s freezing or no AC when it’s broiling. We did seek some answers from the utility to questions about why they don’t bury more power lines and what they’ve done since 2011’s storms Irene and Lee ripped the grid to pieces.

As for the former, it’s a question of money — “Burying all lines would cost about $18 billion [according to a study that’s already a decade old] and permanently add about $10,000 per year to the average electric bill. In addition, property owners would be required to change their electrical connections from overhead to underground at their cost.” Okay then.

As for grid resilience work, according to CH, some $1.2 billion has been spent on electric and natural gas infrastructure since Fortis took over back in 2013; $768 million of that on electric. That’s an impressive number but recent events have proven that it’s not enough. The way the utility sees it, the problem of falling branches taking out transmission lines traces back to the trees from where the branches fell; if we didn’t live in one of the most arboreal areas in America, there would be fewer outages. We’re trying, said the utility — “Tree trimming and vegetation management expenses increased from about $15 million per year in 2013 to [a budgeted] $26 million per year in 2022.”

Can the utility do more? Probably. If it does, will we the customer base pay for it in higher bills? Certainly. That’s just how it goes.

Editorials traditionally call for things to be done, or not done. We call for the PSC to take seriously the complaints and stories not just of politicians, but the thousands of regular people who’ve been put through the wringer by CH one way or another. We call for the PSC to devise a penalty that Central Hudson will take seriously. We call upon the jet stream to do whatever it needs to do to funnel storms away from the Gunks for a little while, at least, so we can have one week with uninterrupted air conditioning. Finally, we call on all of us to stay involved to keep an eye on a 19th century regulation system struggling with 21st century problems.