The lights go out

Last night, the power went out in North Shore City, where we live, knocking out power to around 30,000 homes, according to the New Zealand Herald. Apparently a circuit blew up (literally) at a substation that serves this entire area.

In the eleven and a half years I’ve been here, it’s only the second major outage I can recall (the previous one was at the same substation, maybe 8 to 10 years ago). There have been others affecting smaller areas, usually because someone crashed into a power pole, or because a transformer failed, but a blackout on this scale is very unusual.

We knew where our torches (“flashlights” in Americanese) and candles were, so we had light pretty quickly. However, without power we had no heat (nothing to drive the fan in the central heater). Fortunately, the power was only off about an hour, maybe less.

It was reminder of how dependent we are on electricity, which powers pretty much everything in the house. My computer is on a UPS battery backup, which provides just enough time to shut down before it, too, has no power left. That wasn’t enough time, however, to finish editing or posting yesterday’s podcast, meaning that this local power cut had an affect beyond its limited geographic area.

Most interesting to me was the number of people who commented on how brilliant the stars looked without the lights. So I went out and looked, and they were brilliant, but nothing particularly unusual—the stars are often brilliant where we live. So, I’m wondering if maybe these people just don’t normally look at the stars. If so, the power cut accomplished at least one positive thing.