We have power cuts here so frequently that almost all houses invest in a backup generator, because we'd probably have to stay in the dark every Thursday night otherwise.
But the generator runs on batteries that are charged when there is power, so if there are cuts too frequently, as is sometimes the case in the monsoon, the generator runs out of power soon too. But that barely happens once a year.
However, I do remember a time a few years ago when there was some sort of major problem with the power supply of the entire neighborhood, and we didn't have power after 6 pm till 11 am the next day for what seemed like
days. It was great fun, we used to light all the tea light candles and bathe the room in flickering shadows, and bedtime was rather late a few times, because we just lay about in the living room chatting about random things. I remember a particular weekend when everyone in the entire lane, (it's comprised of several apartment buildings around three or 4 storeys high), and the neighboring lane, gathered on the terraces of their respective buildings, lit candles, brought up food, and just talked to one another across the street (it's a quiet one lane dead end affair) or gazed at the stars,which you could see more of than usual. We kids would dart down for a while, wander around, go up to someone else's terrace to sample the food there, and then come back to our own one. There's a system of smallish hills that starts from the end of our lane, so it wasn't really a 'middle of the city' feel. I don't think anyone went to bed till 2 am that night. It only lasted around two weeks though, then the problem was fixed and we were back to our usual routines in brightly lit rooms. This was around 2014 or so, nothing quite like it has happened since.
Rob Houghton wrote:I remember having a lot of powercuts in the 1970's when I was a kid - but most weren't due to strikes, but to the fact that our houses were supplied by cables hanging from poles across the canal at the back of our houses. When the wind blew sometimes the cables would come down or clash together, or sometimes they were weighted with snow.
We have 3 high tension (I don't remember the exact wattage, but it's really high) cables running through our lane (and of course they
had to be at the level of
our home
), and up until two years ago we used to have several smaller ones running above them perpendicularly across, and the smaller ones aren't particularly taut either. It's a really dangerous system, but they've fixed it now. But two years ago, in a storm, with the wind howling around, one of the smaller wires was flung around so violently that it touched two of the high tension cables
at the same time, and well, you can guess what happened next. We were all poised near the window (but ready to run) watching in fear and astonishment, my dad desperately trying to call the authorities, when it happened. There was a HUGE boom, the windows shook, we all turned away on reflex, and the unfortunate wire lay snapped in two, severed ends trailing across the street below, one end tied to the top of our building, the other end disappearing off God knows where. It was frankly terrifying, and could have been so much worse. Thankfully now the overhead wires are all passed through a different route, but seriously, it took them long enough to realize that.