ups and downs

And how did you survive yesterday’s massive power blackouts across Melbourne and Victoria and the accompanying chaos? If you were listening to 3AW – and we were off air briefly when it hit just after 4p.m. – then you would have heard the litany of tales of woe. Traffic jams. Several thousand traffic lights out. Trams reduced to a crawl. Stop- start train service with delays of more than an hour. Stifling carriages and hot jammed station platforms.

Discomfort for young babies both at home and in hospitals and electricity off for hours in many areas.  The good news is that today – despite hiccups—the State Government has decided against emergency power restrictions. For now. For a while they considered banning private air conditioners. Don’t know how they would do that exactly. The streets would be crawling with water police and power police.

The thing to do as a responsible member of the community is to use as little electricity as possible and only use air-conditioning when a dire necessity.

The other human angle to all of this was the plight of people stuck in lifts. Dozens of people. Including my wife, Chanel, who was trapped in a lift in our apartment building for two hours. Two stifling almost airless hours in the darkness.

There were four people in that small lift. One man trapped alone in an adjacent lift who became increasingly agitated. And they weren’t helped by a disembodied voice at the emergency centre reassuring them that there was about as much air inn the lift as in ‘the family car’. I wouldn’t be too happy being locked in a car with three other people and the windows up for two hours.

Luckily, two of the trapped men were from maintenance. They had a broom handle which they all managed to wedge between the doors to at least open a crack for some air – after making sure no fingers were amputated. And Chanel had her battery-powered laptop which, turned on, gave a weak eerie glow.

Being suspended in a lift is always scary. If you are honest they are a bit like planes. We don’t really know how they work. If they break down are they likely to plummet to the ground?  What happens if you are stopped  almost below a floor ? If you get the doors open do you try to climb through then gap to safety. What if the lift starts again when  you are halfway out? You could be cut in half.

Some others questions. When things go wrong why do lift doors always slam shut? Why don’t they automatically spring open ?  Could an emergency battery have the power to get a lift cabin to the next floor and get the doors open? What happens if a spark starts a fire amidst all that grease and debris that inhabits the bottom of a lift shaft? You are trapped in an oven with no escape.

No wonder I raced home to a just freed but shaking wife at 6 o’clock last night.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007