My electricity went off yesterday...in company with lots of other people. I was made aware of the problem by the pipping of my stair lift. I put the lift in for David when he was desperately ill. He never used it but I do occasionally. It carries my heavy luggage and laundry basket up and down. It bleats when for some reason there is no power.
No electricity for me was not convenient but not a disaster. I can still get around under my own speed. I phoned the emergency number and was reassured that it wasn’t just me....we were all in the same boat. And then I waited...I was assured it was back on but mine wasn’t. The advice I was given was to switch it on myself. The switch is in a cupboard high in the kitchen. I don’t do stepladders any more!
Eventually I found a way of getting it back on. The sense of relief was amazing... everything was working again! I then checked with a friend in the village and yes he had been without electricity too. The scale of this event was becoming clear...homes for miles around had been cut off. This morning I hear that the whole country had been affected...it wasn’t just us
The scale of the failure is quite worrying...it was a small taste of the chaos possible in the event of natural or man made disaster. It didn’t last long. But this morning it is a reminder of our frailty and our reliance on electricity. All the things I take for granted were affected yesterday. No one was hurt I don’t think....but the possibility for disaster has stayed with me. We live in strange times.
1 comment:
It was a major outage, but we in North Kent, we seem to have escaped any of the consequences, although some in London lost power.
Perhaps it was the Brexit factor, a coal fired station in the South East failed, than a whole array of Sea based wind farms failed as well. Lots of people stuck in London overnight as trains were cut and some trapped on trains until the early house. A horrific prospect.
We are promised an Inquiry, and the National Grid is threatened with huge fines? Not sure that will achieve anything. Rather throw the money at ensuring that it doesn't happen again.
Shades for me of the winter of discontent and the three day week, when power was rationed. I was living in Europe at the time, and we had power throughout, but were looking home to the UK to see how people here were effected, often at inconvenient times.
We forget those things, we are so used to having power on tap. I know that when we have momentary cuts here, that our alarm goes off, so hoping we don't get any soon.
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