Thursday, November 28, 2019

ELECTRICITY

At about 9.30 a.m. yesterday morning I was multi-tasking (as usual) printing Christmas letters to send to the U.K. while talking to a friend of Doug in Australia when everything went dead.  The power had gone off.

It turned out that one of the two high voltage circuits that feed Northland had tripped and the second was down for maintenance, this left the whole of Northland without power - 92,000 properties.

Doug had an appointment to have stitches removed from his face and, as we assumed power would not be needed for that, we went in to the surgery.  On the way there was a policeman on point duty directing traffic.  Without power the surgery had no record of the appointments for the day but the nurse was able to remove the stitches and we went on our way.  (Luckily the cost was included in the cost of the operation so no Eftpos was needed).

We were then going to visit the Library, the Chemist and the Vets but decided to go home as power would be needed for the transactions, however, when we got back to the intersection the traffic lights were back on so we went to the Library only to find their power was still off.  We were able to find some books (using the torch on my cellphone) and check them out manually.

Just before we left the power came back on so we decided to go to the Cafe de Paris for lunch where their power had also just been restored and go on to the Chemist and Vets for our other purchases.

The first to have power restored was the Hospital and emergency services.  One other major place without power was the Marsden Point Oil Refinery which shut down as part of its safety procedures.

The Council was urging people to conserve water to make it easier for the system to recover when power was restored.  It certainly makes you realise that we depend on electricity for just about everything these days.  The power was off for about 2.5 hours and, in fact,business stopped in the whole district.

The extent of the Northland power outage on 27/11/19.

8 comments:

  1. No power and the whole place closes down. When I was a child, we were the last in a very country area to get power back on, Dad would have hooked up the tractor with a power drive to run the milking machine.Mum would have toast, scrambled eggs and a kettle on the open fire and the linesmen would have a welcome hot breakfast!!!

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    1. Typical country - just get on with it. When we were in the north we had a cast iron stove which was useful in power cuts. It is amazing how everything shuts down these days in a power cut and it was most unusual to see several intersections with police on point duty.

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  2. I heard about that power cut on the News last night and wondered how you had got on.
    I too remember my dad milking cows while hooked up to a tractor, and mum would crank up the coal range to cook dinner.

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  3. It's our freezers that I worry about. The rest I can cope with.

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    1. Not long enough for problems with frozen food luckily.

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  4. That was a massive power outage you experienced! We had an outage the other night as a result of rather unusually strong storm winds. I was at the pool in a water aerobics class when the lights cut out. Out we went & home to a darkened street. The outage lasted for about two hours.

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  5. I read in the news that there was a massive power cut, didn't affect us this time but apparently it was due to bird poo.

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