Power outage = NO rugby.
I know. First world problem.
I had it all in hand.
Alarm set for VERY early am.
Decoder set to the rugby channel.
Extra blanket on hand to wrap myself in.
Chocolate brown hound for company.
SOME things though you can’t control.
Like the power.
So I MISSED the rugby
and from all accounts, it was a marvelous battle.
Back to the power outage though.
This hasn’t been your more general run-of-the-mill power outage.
Fires at sub-stations do that I guess.
Of the 85 000 households initially affected by the outage, 20 000 are still without power over 24 hours later.
We’ve been relatively lucky and were only without power for 16 hours,
then lost it again this morning.
The business district of St. Heliers is STILL without power.
And mobile phone signal.
NO work for me.
No power = no lights, no phone line, no security, no till.
AND no customers.
The village looks like a ghost town.
I collected the paperwork and came home.
Having moved here from a country that suffers numerous and frequent power outages,
it stuns me how inadequately prepared New Zealanders are.
Granted, power outages here aren’t the norm
but there are still basic steps that should be in place for an outage.
For a start, many homeowners don’t have the were-withal to open their automated gates without power. It was a given in SA that you knew how and where the manual over-ride for the gates were. One of the many tweets circulating yesterday was one lauding how marvelously quiet the streets of St. Heliers were as everyone was stuck behind their automated gates!
Funny, but true.
Even here, in The Flat @ No. 14, I had to climb over the boundary wall. Fortunately no avid happy snappers have been around to catch the candid moments.
It’s necessitated the use of a stepladder and some rather precarious moves for one who is so vertically challenged. The youngest lemming, with youth and height on his side, casually lifts himself up and over the wall with nary a backward glance.
Sigh.
It’s ironic that, in a first world country like New Zealand, a power outage of this magnitude has the potential to bring so much to a grinding halt.
It HAS been entertaining though AND I’ve had an unexpected day off work!
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