On Wednesday July 10, 2024, a huge storm hit Cape Town.
At 10.45pm that night, our electricity went out, and did not come back on again until about 11am on Sunday July 14. We were without power for 84 hours.
That was by no means the worst of the storm’s impact though: 35,000 homes were flooded, shipping was disrupted, houses had their roofs blown off, trees were uprooted and schools were closed.
Our three days without power were among the least of anyone’s problems. (And of course there are many households in South Africa that don’t have electricity at all.)
Those powerless days weren’t fun. I kept my laptop going for as long as I could, only doing the most essential work, but it finally died on Friday afternoon. We were charging our phones in our cars, and worrying about the contents of the fridge and freezer. Many long phone calls to the city council brought only the information that they couldn’t say how long it would take to restore power. This was not surprising: a social media post by our local city councillor said the local electricity depot had had over 3000 calls for help logged.
But things could have been way worse – and there were, as always, lessons learned and things to celebrate.
The benefits of being pre-disastered: There’s a moment in the 1982 film The World According to Garp, when Garp (played by Robin Williams) tells his wife that they will buy a house into which a small plane has just crashed because it has been “pre-disastered” – nothing as bad as that could ever happen again, he says. (Watch the clip here).
In Cape Town, we’ve lived through a water crisis, and as a country we’ve endured years of load shedding. Because we are thus pre-disastered, we have what’s popularly called an inverter, with a battery, which kept our Internet router going well into Friday night. We have a gas hob and were able to cook and boil water and make terrible toast by balancing it on a makeshift platform above the gas flame.
We have a set of LED strips in the main rooms of the house, run off a small bank of batteries which are connected to a tiny solar panel. And this set of modest load shedding alleviation measures really made a difference in a truly dismal couple of days. (If we’d had a full solar array, it’s dubious to what extent that would have helped. Skies remained grey until Sunday.)
The help of friends: Friends whose power survived the storm allowed us to bring a motley assortment of computers to their house for charging; my mother’s was the cellphone charging venue. And in her house, I had a wonderful warm shower.
The games – and a book: No television, no Internet. We turned to Scrabble. In recent years, we’ve used online dictionaries on our phones while playing Scrabble. On Saturday morning, with no Internet and conserving our phones for important things like calling the council, we took out my 1980 edition of the Concise Oxford and rediscovered the pleasure of a dictionary in which you always see a word you didn’t know existed. “Pingy”, unfortunately for my son, is not a word. But pinguid is. It means oily or greasy – something we did not know and would not have seen in an online dictionary.
Common cause: We supported each other; made meals together; sat around by candlelight together. It was cold, and dark, and damp. But we maintained our equilibrium and our sense of humour..
In the Saturday Scrabble game, I managed to get a seven-letter word on the board, winning the game and beating my husband – the first time in almost thirty years of marriage. On Sunday, he beat all of us, as usual.
“Surely that means the power will come on,” said my son. “Order has been restored to the universe.”
He was right.
READ MORE
Load shedding – we have no words | Safe Hands
Seven ways to save a stage of load shedding | Safe Hands
Nine things you need to know about electricity | Safe Hands
Loadshedding solutions for home office workers (that won’t break the bank)
When the taps run dry: Things we learned in Day Zero | Safe Hands
Main picture: Cape Town during a storm in 2012, picture by Ian Barbour, Flickr, CC BY 2.0
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