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Was sitting inside at around 4pm today enjoying our lovely evaporative cooling and suddenly the sound of air pouring out of the vents just stopped. I thought it was odd because evaporative cooling doesn’t usually turn off like that, so I looked around the room and sure enough all appliances had gone off. Not to mention it’s strange when you’re using a laptop and the power goes as the computer just continues running on battery and web pages stop loading before the wireless network drops out.

Thought I’d be smart and drive down to the supermarket to do some shopping that needed to be done. Though along the way, not a single set of traffic lights were working and Safeway too was without power. Fortunately I managed to get in there while the building was still cool and they were running the store on emergency lighting and minimal power for the cash registers (without the conveyor belts or any of the displays). Though the checkout guy said they’d be closing it as soon as it gets hot. Went home still no power, so went over to Chadstone which still had power. Came back home to cook dinner and fortunately the power came on not long after.

Thought it may have been caused by the load placed on the electricity system from refrigerative cooling systems (as opposed to more energy efficient evaporative coolers), though as it turns out it was caused by bushfires taking out a main transmission line. In total, we lost two gigawatts of power out of the state total of nine gigawatts. Radio reports were saying that over a thousand sets of traffic lights were out, so needless to say, police were very scarce and the roads were chaotic.

Well I’m glad we have our power back!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Weather, Melbourne, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.