Tag Archives: Davidstow

Storm Eunice Blacks Out Davidstow

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It’s just gone 10 AM, and Storm Eunice is raging outside. Our lights went out and our uninterruptible power supplies started beeping a couple of minutes ago. The lights came back on and the beeping stopped a few seconds later. There are 13,884 properties suffering a power cut in Cornwall, but at least ours was brief!

However some other local residents are not so fortunate:

Western Power Distribution currently estimate that the fault will be fixed by 1 PM, but what with one thing and another that strikes me as being a bit optimistic.

[Edit – 11:00 February 19th]

WPD have been gradually fixing the faults on their network in the Davidstow area following Storm Eunice yesterday. However there are still 690 properties that have been without electricity for over 24 hours:

There are also still several more faults nearby:

[Edit – 14:00 February 19th]

It seems our flickering lights this morning meant that we’ve just dodged another metaphorical electric bullet here on the fringes of Davidstow. Whilst yesterday’s fault is now almost fixed:

another big high voltage fault hit this side of the Atlantic Highway this morning:

[Edit – 18:00 February 19th]

We may have managed to dodge the first two bullets, but unfortunately not the third. I went on a bike ride around the neighbourhood this afternoon try to find some WPD engineers. More on all that in due course, but I failed miserably in my mission until the very end of my ride. This was the sight that greeted me at the end of our lane:

This was the reason for their visit:

[Edit – 12:00 February 20th]

We’ve received some unexpected good news this morning. Thanks to the efforts of Western Power’s engineers by floodlight overnight electricity is already flowing around our ring mains once again!


The Great Davidstow Blackout Saga

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Today’s title refers back to a similar incident we experienced back in 2014 at our previous premises half way up Haldon Hill near Exeter. The forecast for Storm Arwen suggested lots of power cuts in lots of places. We thought we had escaped unscathed. Until the very early hours of this morning that is, when this happened:

https://twitter.com/jim_hunt/status/1464760584591843332

A few minutes later this information appeared on Western Power Distribution’s power cut map:

By that time our mains power had returned, but that of 18 of our near neighbours had not.

It is now over 12 hours later, and those 18 properties are still unintentionally “off grid”:

I’ve recently returned from a bike ride around the local, somewhat soggy lanes, where I happened across a valiant 3 man WPD repair crew:

It seems that some of their South West colleagues were up country helping out in the Midlands, and they had started their current shift a mere 6 hours after finishing the previous one.

Their efforts seem to have paid off, since after returning home the WPD web site was running properly once again, to reveal this no doubt welcome information to our near neighbours:

Based on my conversation with the repair crew and subsequent poring over a map of WPD’s distribution grid here is my best estimation of what happened during the power cut in Trevivian. Firstly here’s my video of what was happening to WPD’s wires in the vicinty of Tremail in the immediate aftermath of Storm Arwen, together with a comment on the current high retail price of electricity:

I’m not sure why it took until gone midnight, but 2 of the conductors carrying the 3 phase 11 kV supply from Tremail past Trevivian came down in the early hours of Sunday morning:

At first Tremail was amongst those cut off by the fault, but then WPD opened the air break isolators identified by green arrows and turned the power from Davidstow substation back on. After that everyone’s lights came back on apart from the properties powered by the network between the two isolating switches.

What with one thing and another it then took quite a while to repair those sections of cable and close the ABIs again! Here’s a close up of the ABI at the Tremail end of the isolated section of the local electricity distribution grid in normal operation:

and here’s a picture of it that might be more familiar to those who travel the road between Tremail and Trevivian on a regular basis: