Windsor Ballet Alternative

As I am sure everyone knows, about the only time Windsor gets media coverage is when there is talk about booze (from the good old days), strippers and gambling at the Casino.

Well the border has given us a bit more coverage. Now we got some national attention in the US (over 150 media outlets carried the story as of 6:15 AM this morning) and we can thank DTE Energy and the Detroit/Windsor Tunnel for that. Here are some excerpts from the story:

• CBS News
  
  Power Outage Affects Parts of Detroit
  
  DETROIT, Nov. 29, 2005
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  (AP) A power outage Tuesday affected a large area of Detroit's east side and shut down a tunnel connecting the city with Canada.
  
  Officials at the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel informed Canadian authorities that it closed at 11:57 a.m., said Danny Yen of the Canada Border Services Agency. The Ambassador Bridge, the other crossing connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, was not affected by the outage.
  
  It was caused by a problem at an electrical station that feeds several substations, said Len Singer, a spokesman for DTE Energy Co.

I guess we are lucky that the Bridge did not have power problems or if they did, they had backup generators so that traffic could continue or imagine the back-ups. My recollection is that when we had the big blackout, the Tunnel was closed down for a period of time but the Bridge was not.

One of the troubling aspects from the perspective of the City's ownership of the Tunnel however is the Free Press headline "Partial blackout in Detroit shuts down tunnel." If you were coming into Canada, which crossing would you use?

Not only now do we have to fight back-ups but power outages as well to convince people to come over here.