Yesterday we had a powerfail here in the region where I am in the Netherlands. Nothing new you would say, because by now I should be super used to powerfails after all those years in Sint Martin.
And I am, because we had all kinds of precautionary measures for dealing with not having electricity. I would have candles scattered throughout the house. I would have a a UPS battery connected to my router to keep some wifi going. I would even have a gasoline generator for when the power wasnt there for multiple days.
Coffee
I even had a perculator coffee machine next to a normal coffee machine on electricity so I could boil water on the stove and still have some black gold. And a stove. Indeed a working stove. Because that was connected to a normal stand alone gasbottle, so cooking was never a problem without electricity.
44.500 households with no current
So today here I was making coffee and nothing was working. But this house is not mine, so I initially thought that I was doing something wrong until I also noticed some digital clocks were not working. Everything was off. Okay cool, no problem. I got this, because I had it already so often before in the last couple of years.
But the fact is, I dont know too much in this house. And for instance the stove is keramic, so its needs electricity. Time for some other tasks. But most of those things required online researching, which I couldnt do haha.
Trafficlights
So I did what I always did in Sint Martin when I was fed up with it. I would leave the house, and go to a place that DOES have electricity. Easy :) So same tactic here, but I saw that over a 5 km not a single traffic light was not working. And it was kind of chaotic on the road. Because people are used to traffic lights. I was thinking about how this was in Sint Martin and why this was never a problem. Ow yeah, we only had 1 trafficlight there ;))))
All in all
Here in the Netherlands we are not used to powerfails. At all. And this is something to consider about that if for some reason stuff would go south someday everything would be go to crap. Food for thought I guess.
