The Best Laid Plans...

They built Las Vegas to peel Southern Californians.  Like a grape.  To take their excess cash.  And sometimes more than their excess.  Sometimes all of it...

Except in order to give Lost Wages your wages, you have to first get there.  Which involves either an expensive, time-consuming flight, or a 5-hour drive.  Sometimes you can do it in less than 4 hours, with a radar detector, and sometimes it takes a bit more.  Like if the traffic is heavy.  Which it can tend to be upon occasion.  

But nothing like this past weekend.

At about 9:00 a.m. this past Friday morning a semi-trailer truck packed full of lithium-ion batteries crashed.  More than 70,000 pounds of batteries.  And it started to burn.  And burn.  

And burn! 

What you may not know is that when lithium-ion starts to burn, it doesn't stop.  It will burn until it's entirely consumed.  And pouring water on it only makes it worse.  Like throwing water on burning grease fire.  Only mucho worse.  Except some of those wonderful First Responders might not know that. 

So the Northbound lane of I-15, the only way to drive to Vegas, was completely shut down.  And when those First Responders started dowsing it with water, the fire spread over to the Southbound lane.  And that lane was closed as well.  

Resulting in the Traffic Jam From Hell.  A traffic jam  more than 120 miles long.

The wreck happened just north of Baker.  That's about 90 miles from Las Vegas.  And there's virtually nothing after Baker.  And the motoring public...stopped motoring.  

It was 110 degrees out and nobody could move.  Not forward, nor backward.  Whole families in scorching hot cars, with weekends up in flames.  Some cars resorted to driving along the median to try and escape.  Other drivers, having gotten the word, tried to avoid the jam by taking the cutoff to route I-40.  Clogging that Interstate Highway as well.  It was not only a massive traffic jam, there was no clear way out of it.  

For hours.  For days.  

There were no gas stations out there.  No shopping malls.  No rest areas.  Just miles and miles of desert.  So cars could not run their A/C's.  No convenience stores.  No places to hydrate for those without water.  No food available.  It was a true emergency.  A long one.  With no way out.

Las Vegas, as we know, is an "attractive nuisance."  One that draws us SoCal residents to it like moths to a flame.  Except there's only two ways to get there.  And flying is too expensive for many of us.  Leaving us having to drive.  And never expecting we might wind up stranded in our cars halfway there.  Something to think about the next time you have a need to be fleeced (did you ever think about who pays their light bill?  You do...).   

This is being written on Tuesday morning, just before I push "Publish."  The wreck happened 96 hours ago, and so far as I know, this lithium-ion fire is still burning.  They were able to open the Southbound lane of I-15 early Saturday.  And then to do a car-by-car, one-lane-at-a-time escape.  Of tens of thousands of cars.  The nice folks in Lost Wages are considering this to be one of the very worse (un)natural disasters ever.  Because they lost so much revenue.  Just imagine how awfully it impacted the lives of all those miserable folks stuck in hot cars, for hours and hours.  

And why do I bring this up?  

Most Tesla batteries use lithium-ion technology!  And so do many of its competitors.  That means roughly 7% of all the cars on our roads use the very same technology as this semi-truckload of batteries!  Electric cars have a 2,000 pound power plant under the passenger's feet.  It's a tightly-wound electricity generator that's often hard to contain.  That's why Teslas are known to spontaneously self-combust!  And burn for hours!  One just did so in a parking garage in Boston and burned the entire 8-floor structure, and the hundreds of cars therein, right down to the ground!  

And another thing.  First responders won't use the Jaws of Life on Teslas, and some other electric cars.  They fear getting electrocuted!  And remember, a computer controls their door locks.  And just might lock you in when you want to get out.  NEED to get out!  I'm urging my Fellow Patriots to consider these important factors before choosing their next automobile.  

That choice just might save your life...