We were off the grid for 42 hours this week It was quite scary.
On Monday morning I woke up early, as I often do. It was dark, and there was no electricity. Nothing unusual, I was prepared for that, it was one of Eskom's scheduled load-shedding periods, so I booted up my laptop, lit a candle and worked for a couple of hours. Some time between 4:00 and 4:30 am the power should come on and charge up my laptop, and I'd copy my work to a USB flash drive, boot up my desktop computer and continue working there. Only by 4:30 the power had not come on again. and my laptop began beeping that its battery was getting low. There must be a fault in the power supply, so at 4:34 I sent an SMS to the municipal Electricity Department to report it.
Usually when one sends such an SMS to the Electricity Department a reply comes back in a couple of minutes saying "Your reference number for the power failure at (your address) is xxxx", but this time it didn't. That usually means that the power failure is widespread and the system is jammed with lots of such messages.
At about 7 am our son Simon got up, and said the power had gone off at about 9:00 pm on Sunday evening -- Western Easter Sunday. That might mean that a lot of the staff of the Electricity Department might have gone off for the long weekend so repairs might take a bit longer. T thought I'd better go on to Facebook and warn family, friends and acquaintances that I might not be replying to email for a while, so I switched on mobile data on my phone and tried to get on to Facebook. "Connect to a network" it tells me. Oops, that must mean that the standby batteries in the cell phone towers have run down (perhaps with all those SMSs reporting the power failure).
My wife Val went to the shop to buy bread. Because of load shedding they have generators, and perhaps they use gas for baking the bread, so they had bread, but cash only. Their card machines won't connect to the bank, and no one uses those old zip-zap card thingies any more. It seems like we're well and truly off the grid. Our other son has Whatsapp on his phone and had managed to connect to the neighbourhood watch group, where someone had heard that some pylons had blown down in a storm on Sunday night.
We went to the Alkantrant library to renew our books -- we used to be able to do it by email. On the way we tried to charge our phones with a USB cord plugged into the cigarette lighter (does anyone actually light cigarettes in cars any more?) The robot was working in Stanza Bopape Street, and the lights were on in the library, so it was only to the north of that that the power was off. The librarian said that, though the lights were on, the library computer was down because the server was in the area where the power was off. She also told us that the pylons that had blown down in the storm on Sunday night were on the highway between Simon Vermooten and Solomon Mahlangu Roads, and that the power had been off in Mamelodi where she lived too.
We drove out along the highway to see the scene, and see the progress, if any, on repairs. There were a few vehicles at the side of the road, and in a gap in the bush I caught a quick glimpse of a fallen pylon, but no sign of progress on repairing them. It looked like it might not be a matter of days, but more like weeks, or even months, before it could be repaired.
We went to The Grove shopping mall, and while Val was inside she left the car engine running to carry on charging the phones, and I took advantage of the signal to put a message on Facebook that we might be incommunicado for an indefinite period. We got a newspaper at another shop, and there was report on what had happened. About six pylons, weakened by the depredations of metal thieves, had blown over in a storm on Sunday night, The mayor was quoted as saying that the public would be kept informed about when the power was likely to be restored, though how that information was to reach those most affected, he did not say.
So all the things that we have become dependent on that rely on electricity are suddenly no longer there, indefinitely. No phones -- cell phones won't connect, and even if they did, the batteries would soon be flat. The landline won't work -- since it was converted from copper to optical fibre it needs electricity for the ONT. Get a UPS, they say, but does a UPS last for 42 hours? We'll be scared to go out because the burglar alarm battery will be flat. You can't draw cash from an ATM, so you can't buy anything at the shop, no card, and no cash either. It's a daunting prospect.
Yet in my youth, between the ages of 8 and 12, I lived off the grid for more than four years, and survived.
We lived on a smallholding in Sunningdale, just outside Johannesburg/ The municipal boundary ran along George Avenue, Sandringham. South of George Avenue was Sandringham, which got municipal electricity, north of it was Sunningdale, which did not. We'd have to ask Escom, which had no plans to supply the area for several years to come. The house had a 32V DC system, driven by a petrol generator, with a bunch of car batteries, but it soon stopped working. So we used paraffin lamps for light -- ordinary ones with wicks for bedrooms and bathrooms, Coleman lamps with mantles for the kitchen, dining room and sitting room. For music we had a wind-up gramophone that played 78 rpm records. There was no telephone. We applied for one at the post office, but their waiting list was four years long, and, like Escom, they didn't have wires in the area, and would have to erect the infrastructure if enough people applied. We did eventually get a phone when I was about 11 I'd almost forgotten how to use one; the last time we'd had one was when we'd lived in Westville, near Durban, when I was 6. The number we got, 45-1870, is the only previous phone number I've ever had, apart from the current one, that I can still remember.
We had an ice box, a real icebox, a wooden affair that you put a big block of ice in, with a drip tray underneath to catch the water as it melted, Fortunately for us, my father was a chemist and the factory where he worked made dry ice -- frozen carbon dioxide at -78 degrees, but whether F or C I can't remember. It didn't drip, it evaporated, and my father brought it home in a cardboard box once a week. We'd just take out the old empty box and put in the new full one. When my parents had parties they filled the bathtub with water, put in a few dozen bottles of beer with a chunk of dry ice in it. It bubbled away as it evaporated, and there was a plentiful supply of cold beer.
We also had cows and chickens and fruit trees and almond trees and (cape) gooseberry bushes. In school holidays I would go round with my mother in her little Wolseley 8 helping to deliver eggs, butter and cream to customers all over Sandringham and Sydenham.
When I was 12 we got a diesel engine and generator which produced 220V electricity, and suddenly the appliances that had sat gathering cobwebs for 5 years began to be used again -- the washing machine, the radiogram, the electric sowing machine (in the mean time my mother had got used to using a treadle one).
But back then, living off the grid wasn't a big deal. People paid by cash or cheque, no credit cards. Accounts came by snail mail, no email (I've just heard a rumour that the post office has filed for bankruptcy -- is it true? Another of Maggie Thatcher's chickens coming home to roost).
When we lived off the grid my father took me to school in the morning, to Fairmount Government School, a mile away. In the afternoon I'd walk home, at the age of 8, over the bare veld, which is now the leafy suburb of Glenhazel. But now we have become so dependent on electronic devices that living off the grid becomes so daunting as to be almost unthinkable.
No comments:
Post a Comment