Yuku free message boards

We've had a number of brownouts over the past few years, particularly under the privatised system. There's candles and matches in strategic possies around the house, as well as a couple of torches and it doesn't hurt that I've got some really good headlamps in my caving gear.

There were a lot of outtages over the most recent summer, during our hottest recorded temperatures in years, including our hottest day ever. They were inconvenient for a lot of people, including some colleagues with young families who were without power for the best part of a week.

We were lucky where we were, as our local outtages didn't last for longer than about 12 hours at a time. We have no airconditioning at home, so it was just a matter of being careful to keep the fridge door closed. Having gas cooking and hot water didn't hurt either, not that anyone wanted a hot water shower at the time. Being summer, it was light until late and then there were torches or candles. It was also too hot to have the computer on most of the time, anyway!

One Friday there was a brown out that affected a lot of the city, and shut most of our side of town down. We were told we could go home but a few of us chose to stay as the outtages were causing problems with public transport and there was sufficient residual coolness in the building that it was bearable to keep working - and much preferable to being outside in the heat. We were getting phone calls from colleagues trapped in crowded train carriages with no cooling, or colleagues still baking on platforms telling us to stay where we were - some of them even came back. It didn't hurt that one of the visiting IT people popped down to a local supermarket and got a massive box of cheap icy poles to share and the social club made the executive decision to hand out its stash of cold soft drinks from one of the unpowered fridges. (It was also the day before Black Saturday, so seemed really trivial in comparison by the time we were back at work on the Monday.)

Winter would be a bit of a different prospect, I think. And so would be coping for longer than 24 hours - and often, like some of the people who live in the parts of Queensland and northern NSW that keep flooding at the moment.