First World Problems

October 3, 2024

Oberon suffered a power failure on Saturday, September 28 affecting 1402 users, including everyone in a business along Oberon Street. (Marlon from Brazen Burgers was seen buying a sausage sandwich for lunch from the gas-powered Rotary sausage sizzle outside the Malachi. Desperate times!)

Powerless!

Things could have been worse. And they were a few years ago in Wentworth Falls.

This article is republished from The Millenium Project under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

First World Problems
July 9, 2011

I had a flu vaccination in late May, so what has been laying me low for the last week must have been one of those common colds that quackery has a myriad of cures for. I tried some alternative medicine but that didn't work. I was surprised at this, because I had carefully followed the steps used to make homeopathic cold remedy – I filled a small bottle with water from the tap, printed out a label that said "Homeopathic Cold Remedy", stuck the label on the bottle and then put a drop of water from the bottle under my tongue every hour for twelve hours.

I might have got better faster if my locality hadn't experienced wind storms gusting to about 140km/h, causing extensive damage to infrastructure. I was without power from Tuesday to Friday, and even though I was able to borrow a small generator to keep the lights on it wasn't sufficient to provide heating in the below-freezing temperatures. Still, I was one of the lucky ones. A 70-year-old man was found in a house in a nearby suburb suffering from hypothermia. He had been trapped in his house for three days without light or heating and was found when emergency workers came to clear fallen trees. Also lucky in a sense were the passengers in this train that had a tree fall on it. They were trapped in the train for some hours but by what will inevitably be called a miracle there was nobody in the upper deck of the carriage that was crushed. The damage to the train was so severe that the carriage had to be dismantled to clear the line because it couldn't just be towed away.

Photos from the Blue Mountains Gazette

I live on top of a mountain and the loss of all electric power to the area meant that water couldn't be pumped up to fill reservoirs so we had immediate restrictions on water use, although I must admit that ideas of washing the car or watering the lawn while the trees in my yard were attempting to become horizontal didn't assume high priority. The local telephone exchange also managed to find out how good the backup batteries were, which was not very good at all so the phones went off.

So, coughing, spluttering, blocked nose and weepy eyes, no electricity for heating or cooking, no telephone or Internet ADSL connection, no trains, water restrictions (but no way to boil water for coffee anyway), sub-zero temperatures and wild winds knocking down trees. How was your week? Now all I have to do is figure out how to get this broken branch out of the tree that is suspending it over my lounge room.

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