Backup, Anyone?

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It's at times of the season such as this when awareness of the fragility of modern life becomes particularly acute. We've at least got more than one way of heating ourselves, should the electricity grid fail, as it has tonight in north-west Anglesey: the whole of that quadrant having gone down for some reason; we have a wood-stove that will keep us warm in any case, should it happen here, too. But then, our wood supply is getting shorter, and the top of the hill here is still pretty treacherous after a couple of days of snow: it's not desperate, and I've still got some timber left to cut in the garden, and we do have our excellent little corner shop for supplies five minutes walk away; but you never know, do you? Makes me think of the lack of redundancy in so many many modern systems these days, the most obvious in the time of electrical outages being communications: now the hard telephone dial-tone has almost completely been done away with, none of us have that simple backup of a landline should the proverbial really hit the fan and the internet is suddenly inaccessible and the local mobile masts have died.

The emergency services themselves have no reserves should the need for them suddenly spike - as in times like this, when the weather suddenly turns nasty on us - resulting in frankly very incomplete cover for those in need. Everything is supplied in the modern world on a Just In Time basis, with supply lines galactically huge in scale and where the slightest hiccup by the smallest butterfly in the remotest valley on Earth can bring the whole edifice to its knees in nanoseconds. Redundancy has been given the most negative of connotations in modern life, but without it, we are always just one tiny brick away from losing the entire house in one fell swoop. Redundancy of resources equals safety for our immediate needs, and the ability for us to quickly recoup the status quo after whatever disaster has befallen us. How many of us truly appreciate that fragility and the seriousness of its implications?

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