Widespread power cuts

Brexit for you

No Thameslink trains from Borehamwood and therefore unable to get into Town to see Europe at the Donmar, too late when I found out to get over to Stanmore and get there by Tube.

Now settling down to a rare Friday night at home.

When it went and saw out of out flat it was a widespread issue... dived into the ice cream because you know eat the important stuff first before it melts!!

But it shows how much everything needs the power and its okay people online saying blackouts in 70s were common... but in the 70s not everything was powered like it is today. The knock on effect really causing chaos now though.

Having caught up with the issue on the news, on the positive side at least I am fortunate to be home as it seems a lot of people will not have that luxury tonight.

Given that this is apparently such an unlikely occurrence, I’m sure that they will be searching to see if there was a, what might be least scarily referred to as, a ‘human element’ involved.

Anyway, the transport system has changed markedly and is more prone to electrical failure. The west coast mainline wasn’t electrified until the mid seventies and that was the first major line to do so, the east coast mainline had only just started by then and it took until the early nineties for it to be completed.

More of this to look forward to.
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/climate-change-apartheid-poor-iraq-effects-heatwave-a9049206.html

Things are not 'exactly the same', I mentioned the change in methods of train transport but I could go on and list plenty more things that are different. Here's one, the way that power is now hackable in a way that was impossible in the seventies, given our current position any power cuts could be through state or other criminal sabotage. 

You are right that we are complacent but not in a 'things have always been like this' way. We are complacent in that we have left the keys of our democracy in the lock. We are already at war;the way that information is being used to pervert reality is as it has been for decades but the means of doing this is now so much more available to anyone who seeks to do so. 

Was this sabotage? Don't know but it most definitely has shown those who wish to do so, how easy it will be to cause chaos. There are recent accusations from both the US and Russia that their power grids are being probed in preparation for an attack and we already know how places like Ukraine in 2015 had substations shut down by Russian hackers and that was primitive in comparison to what is now possible.

I'm a bit concerned that there's talk of fining National Grid for the problems.

Things break down. You can build as much redundancy into systems as you like, but it's expensive and if they'd built in too much surplus capacity people would have accused them of wasting money. The important thing is to learn where the points of failure are and adjust your plans accordingly. What you don't do is treat people as if they were naughty children doing it for a prank.

I remember rather enjoying the power cuts of the 70s....we had a Tilly lamp we used to light up the room and I think we used it as an excuse to not do homework! Poor parents may have been stressing about it all but as children we accepted every excuse given to not work!

Was a young girl living with my parents in a thirteenth floor flat during the 'Winter of Discontent' as it was known in 1978/79.

My main memories of this time were the unannounced power cuts, because of striking National Grid workers, which meant walking up/down twenty six flights of stairs (even harder work for mums with kids and buggies); people getting stuck in the lifts, so firemen had to come and winch up the lifts to get them out and being in a flat meant everything was electrical so we had to light candles until the power came on again (not forgetting this was Winter). Also, my uncle died and was left in the undertakers for some weeks (as were others) as the gravediggers were on strike and then seeing images of Leicester Square in the media, which had been turned into one massive rubbish tip as the bin men were on strike. People only had landlines or had to find a telephone box to ring anyone then, too.

This was not a Monty Python sketch, (though I can see it might read like one!😀) but what was actually happening then.

My siblings and I definitely did. We'd all cheer when the lights went off and boo when they came back on. It was exciting and there was something nice about the flickering candles.

At a previous job a colleague of about the same age and I would occasionally baffle a young recently graduated colleague with Tales Of What It Was Like In The 70s. She couldn't believe us about the frequent power cuts. Wednesday half-day closing was another one she struggled with.

This is part of the problem this country has, rose tinted nostalgia for something that was destructive and which badly affected the nation for years. The reality was much worse and needs to be said as well. We don’t want it, or a war, or a massive disruption of the country and should be explaining the reality and stopping anything that would lead to it, either through an oil crisis, a strike or, shockingly, the self inflicted knifing in the gut of Brexit. I appreciate that it’s necessary to make the most of what is inflicted on us but to do it on purpose to ourselves is just psychotic.