Reading some of this thread made me think about a guy I used to work with. A little before Ike a crew from his co-op came out to trim trees in his neighborhood, and he refused to let them trim any of the trees on his property. He was bragging at work about how he ran them off. During Ike, the wind knocked down a couple of limbs from one of his trees onto the lines, knocking out power to the whole neighborhood. While the crew was repairing the lines, he was out there bitching at them for not maintaining the lines and the trees that he had told them not to touch. (Witnessed by a friend of mine who lived in that neighborhood.) The next day he was griping at work that the whole neighborhood was pissed at him, and he didn't know why.
Maintaining utilities, water, sewer, gas, communications, or electric, is an expensive and time consuming operation. Everyone seems to think that you put the wire in the air or the pipe in the ground, and then never think about it again. It ain't that way. Maintenance is labor intensive, and labor is usually the largest expense in the budget. Rate payers don't want to pay for it, but will sure raise hell when there are problems. As in my illustration above, some actively interfere with maintenance activities. So, yeah, every utility can do better, and being without power in this kind of situation is frustrating, but try walking a mile in their shoes before getting judgmental, please.
Now back to, "It's horrible mismanagement and those utilities guys are morons."