Iberien Peninsular Blackout

I could be talking about the forum closure, which I definitely did miss, but I am talking about the loss of electricity supply to Spain and Portugal. I was caught in the centre of Madrid when the power went off. There was absolute chaos. I was with my wife and whilst we are both reasonably fit, there was no way we would have been able to walk to our hotel on the outskirts of the city. I thought it was going to be a night on a park bench. Luckily a friend was able to organise a lift around mid-night.

It might be taken for granted but electricity is badly missed when gone! 
It will be interesting to find out what caused the departure!

It probably isn't the fault  of ' net zero' as such, or rather, as I suspect you mean, the low carbon sources like solar and wind, as we have lost a lot of nuclear as well, but more a failure of those who write rules and decide how much to invest in what,  to keep up with changes in load patterns and the systemic behaviour of increasingly electronic loads. Undersea lines now tend to be DC and inverter driven as well which may not help.

And power cuts are nothing new - its just with computers we notice their effect more than in the 1970s and 1980s for example.

In the UK specifically, quite a lot of kit is old, from the bottom to the top - as a personal example the wiring to my house went in  1969-1970, the cable in the street is slightly older, as are the two pad mount transformers and the 11kV lines that feed the whole estate. That's before we look further back at the pylons ;-)  There are a lot of pinch points and bits rotting away.

Mike

Hello Mike:

There is an old quote here in the US-- "Make sure your powder is dry"- meaning "be prepared for the worst".

Are you and Andy (who also responded) going to create a 72 hour home protection Kit?

No need to create one specially in my case.

At home we have always had tinned food for several days, the camping gas and stove to cook it, candles matches and a wood burning stove, HF radio, UHF walkie talkies, and normal battery radio (VHF MW LW ), There is a jerry can of petrol in the garage...

When the water went off for a few days last year  as we have rain water butts we were able to keep the loo flushed, and had enough drinking water in stock to not need to even go to the emergency water distribution point.

I have inherited that caution from my parents who grew up in wartime, to be ready to survive for quite a while if need be.

Being ready is  also an attitude I try to instill into the Scouts I help lead.

Mike

Mike:

You didn't mention if you have a medical kit?

I spent most of this morning water proofing my wooden hurricane window boards so they are ready to put up.

I also have annual "flood" insurance,  which causes most major structural problems.

Peter

we are indeed reasonably well prepared, not for hurricanes, but for common accidents ;-) When I bought the house I made sure we are about 40-50m above the flood line ;-) 

Mike.

Are you and Andy (who also responded) going to create a 72 hour home protection Kit?

Well all the comms is already on a small UPS - might not go for 72 hours but should easily see us through the usual 1-2 hour power cuts that seems typical here and probably for a few hours of a national blackout should the worse happen. The only time it was off for longer in my experience was when a cable in the street went bang and we were off for the best part of a week (apart from a short spell when the DNO installed a temporary generator, but that seemed to run out of fuel after 24 hours). There's a rechargable work light that and a log burner for space and domestic hot water heating (which will function adequately enough without electric for pumps), an amount of tinned food on the shelves, and during most of the year some additional fresh from the garden. I can store about 2000l of rainwater (but that's looking rather depleted at the moment after about 2 months without rainfall).

   - Andy.

Hello Mike:

Being situated relatively high up doesn't guarantee you are flood free, as the people in Boone North Carolina found out last year during hurricane season. I assume your house is built on clay soils. I live on  Sandy soil which mops up the rain water very quickly.

Peter 

Hello Andy:

Here in Florida one is advised not to store "standing water " around the house because of mosquitoes. 

We do not have roof gutters on our house as they are usually overwhelmed by our high rainfall rates. We have stones located on the ground at the drip lines.

Peter  

We are well off topic but where I am its topsoil of half a metre or less, and then a gravel sand mix down tens of metres to the water table and then more of the same but wet.  The landscape is really the glacial outwash of the last ice age ( the one that ended about 12,000 years ago, so about twice as far back as the first Egyptian pyramids, for some sense of scale. ), all sorts of junk was dropped when the ice melted, so the south of England soil structure is very variable over even a few km.
In terms of wildlife water butts are covered, and excess goes to soakaway, though the thing folk get in garden ponds is frogs, not so much mosquitoes.

Mike.

My rainwater barrels are indeed covered - even the vent holes have a fly mesh screen (intended to keep leaves and other detritus out rather than insects,but it should have the same effect). Not that we have much of an issue with mosquitoes here, not for the moment at least.

   - Andy.

My rainwater barrels are indeed covered - even the vent holes have a fly mesh screen (intended to keep leaves and other detritus out rather than insects,but it should have the same effect). Not that we have much of an issue with mosquitoes here, not for the moment at least.

   - Andy.