Not With A Bang...

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We went over to Bishop's Castle this morning with the intention of getting a bit of food shopping done and maybe grabbing a sausage baguette and coffee from the The Happy Bap, an excellent little eatery specialising in rather fine sandwiches; only to find the entire High Street shut down by an unexpected and very localised power outage. The only two places able to trade - [no electricity, no lighting, no Epos to take payment: all food chillers and freezer cabinets would have to be closed off to conserve low temperatures] -  were Rosie's vintage clothes and curios shop [she takes only cash and the sunshine was providing ample light], and the local filling station, which I assume was either functioning on back-up generators, or fed from a different circuit [unlikely] to the rest of the High Street. A hapless queue was forming at the door of the Cooperative, waiting for the [electric] doors to open, to no avail.

Apparently no advance warning was issued, so one can only assume that the outage was a result of a fault condition. No power company operatives or vehicles were anywhere in evidence, and no-one had a clue as to what was happening. It wasn't even possible to obtain cash as a payment backup as the bank had closed its doors, and naturally, the ATMs weren't functioning. The scope of the list of electricity-dependencies quickly manifested itself before us. Pretty it weren't: all very tolerable and tut-tut inducing in the short term, but how long before annoyance turns through concern to panic? We have truly backed ourselves into a cul-de-sac of our own making. The old adage about eggs and baskets springs to mind.

Where were all the experienced systems engineers when our modern infrastructure was being rolled out? Did no-one think to build in resilience through systems and supply redundancies? Of course not: the whole shebang was comprised of systems built in isolation and brought together on an ad hoc basis, driven by bottom-line, just-in-time thinking. I fear that Apocalypse when it arrives will be less zombie-fuelled post-nuclear Armageddon than the compounding of these very mundanities: a slow dance into a chaos of broken, disparate systems that will render normal life impossible for the majority. Apparently trivial localised events like the Bishop's Castle blackout should serve as a warning to the larger society: we take far too much for granted to be completely safe...

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