August 2011 - Power failures and survival successes
One recent Monday morning our 9-year-old grandsons couldn’t wait to get to school with their news.
It wasn’t quite worthy enough to be included in the class “News” but they had considered it.
“Guess what we did this weekend” they chorused to their friends. “Our washing machine broke down and we all had to do the washing up together. We actually had to DRY the dishes. It was fun.”
“Yes, I had to do that once, too. It WAS fun” bemusedly agreed one of their friends.
I don’t know how long the “fun” appellation would have lasted had this become a regular chore. After all, they find their normal task of clearing the dishwasher so boring that they must try to avoid it at all costs.
But it does make you think of all those family activities that were normally once part of everyday life that actually provided time and space where various family members could interact. All sorts of discussions used to take place over the “dishes”.
Once again during this past week we have all had to resort to an older style of daily life as we have experienced several days without power. We all managed, with varying degrees of success and using varying strategic methods, to carry on.
Of course, I’m not talking about situations where there were people dependent on power for health or other emergency reasons, and for those without any other form of heating life would have been extremely miserable.
“I took the opportunity to clean out my fridge at last,” I heard one person say. “My generator got its first decent run since I’ve had it” reported another. Not everyone has generators, but local shops did a roaring trade in candles and lanterns of all types and sizes.
We had to join a queue at The Red Shed to get our gas bottle filled. One caller to the local radio had a brilliant suggestion: bring in all your solar lights from the garden and rig them up in the house for the night, then the next day put them back outside to recharge.
Of course, all this happened in the middle of the school holidays, which didn’t make things any easier, except for those families who were away. It didn’t help the kids much either.
I remember well when blackouts were common in Sydney in the years after the War. It was always a very satisfying feeling to be able to go to school the next day, safe in the knowledge that uncompleted homework would be accepted as an uncontrollable result of the previous night’s blackout.
How many people can remember the ditty: Melbourne’s on the Yarra, Perth is on the Swan, But give me good old Sydney, Where the light’s are never on!
Because it was the school holidays, many families had relatives and grandchildren staying with them. We had a houseful: an extra three adults and three children under the age of four. Our niece had arrived from Christchurch on the first day of the blackout.
Having experienced the constant power failures there over the last few months, the first thing she said was: “ I never go anywhere in Christchurch anymore without my head torch, but I thought: I’m going to Australia. I’m not going to need it there!” It certainly would have helped.
Our house is fully electric, but we do have a small generator and Chris had rigged up a system of party lights (with the coloured bulbs replaced by ordinary clear ones) around our living areas. “It looks just like a cabaret” enthused our niece, Zoe. We were able to cook on a small primus stove and on the BBQ, despite the fact that a fallen tree was hanging rather perilously above it. Icecream provided an easy dessert, as long as it was all eaten at one sitting.
The ladies at the supermarket told me they couldn’t believe how much icecream they were selling when no one had any freezers to keep it in! Water, of course, was a problem, as we have to pump it from tanks.
The kids loved it: no baths! And washing up once again became a family occupation, as we all waited, towels in hand, for the tiny dribble of water, amazingly still just warm nearly three days after we first lost power, to provide enough water to try to wash dishes for eight people.
The kids, unused to so much space, were happy
to play outside all day, and by 6. 00 o’clock were ready to crash, so the lack of TV or DVD’s didn’t provide a problem. But they couldn’t understand why they weren’t working.
“Because the power’s not on” didn’t mean a thing. A better explanation to them may have been “They’ve run out of batteries.”
They probably would have understood that. Once they’d gone to bed, the adults were able to wind down with candlelit dinners in front of the fire. No one could complain about that.
I feel that the way the world is going with such heavy demands on shrinking resources and an aging infrastructure to handle those resources that we are going to have to get used to finding ways of going without the seemingly unending supply of power we have become used to.
Maybe my grandsons will be part of the last generation to be amazed at such family oriented activities as “doing the dishes.” Maybe it will mean we will all have to learn to slow down. And that could be a very good thing.
As a postscript I would like to mention the cooperativeness of the electricity company in trying to repair damage in such terrible conditions. The weary technicians we passed on the road were still able to smile, as we and hundreds of others kept asking when the power would be returned. And when it was, the courtesy call from Endeavour Energy to see if everything was all right was much appreciated.