Storm Darragh arrived in the West Country yesterday. causing carnage far and wide. Here is how the Devon and Cornwall section of National Grid Electricity Distribution’s power cut map looked at 4 PM:
Somewhat later, here’s how NGED’s table of regional power outages looked:
77 of the 58,423 properties in the South West without an electricity supply were just up the road from us near Chilla:
By 8:30 PM the NGED power cut map was awash with outages:
while our local area looked like this:
The power cut in Chilla was rather confusingly located in Hatherleigh according to the map!
Here’s NGED’s table of outages at the time, this time broken down by county:
When I finally went to bed at 1 AM this morning the power was still out in Chilla, but I was quietly confident that we had escaped the worst that Storm Darragh had to throw at us. I set a couple of computers off running a fairly compute intensive test overnight and laid my weary head on my pillow.
After a good nights rest by recent standards I awoke to find both computers switched off, and their respective uninterruptible power supplies with flat batteries. Evidently we had suffered a power cut during the night!
I switched on my smartphone in a endeavour to discover the cause of the problem, but it had no signal. The rising sun was glowing behind Dartmoor in the distance, so I rushed outside to capture the sunrise on my phone. There I met a neighbour walking her dog. “Have you got a mobile signal?” she enquired. “No” said I. That was to become a familiar refrain as the morning wore on!
After experimenting with this, that and other for quite some time I discovered that if I put my EE SIM card into my Android tablet it managed to detect a faint 4G signal. A sight for sore eyes when you’re involved in a mega (anti?)social media marketing campaign on many fronts!
I swiftly ascertained the cause of our powerlessness:
At this juncture I found myself asking numerous questions, so I decided to ask the National Grid Electricity Distribution support team on X (formally Twitter) some of them:
I expect Grid Customers UK will be very busy for quite some time, but I live in eternal hope of finding some answers eventually.
To be continued…