Today a forklift managed to strike something along Transpower’s Otahuhu-Henderson line, cutting power to west Auckland, the North Shore, and, it would seem, the whole of Northland.

Trains suffered a partial signal failure west of Swanson but were able to more-or-less keep running. If they were electric, this would have been worse.

Relatively fortunately, Auckland City did not lose power.

I start this month-long trial of working without a car next week.

While I was going to look at how I could cope with using PT, my day could completely fall apart if something like this happened again, and for situations like these I’m going to have to retain some sort of access to a fallback vehicle.

Today I was on urgent callout to my Northcote school to ensure we had power to emergency systems (phones, PA system) for as long as possible, and to ensure everything started back up when power was restored. I had to get there quickly.

I drove in.

If today were part of the trial, or if I no longer had my own vehicle, I would have bussed into town and hoped that Cityhop’s systems were unaffected so I could book one of their cars. Today, since the CBD had power it would have worked, but what if the CBD had also lost power, as happened in 2006?

I’d have been screwed, or I would have had to rely on a very expensive taxi ride.

I guess today demonstrated a near-worst case scenario for this trial, showing that I would be more dependent on the city’s infrastructure to work.

power failure · snafu