November 11th, 2021Kyle’s Rant

I KNOW I should thank my lucky stars living the life I live and being born into a first world community, having hot dinners on the table every night and a reliable car to run around in.
I know there are a lot of others worse off than me, there are famines and plagues around the globe, climate change is snapping at our heels and countries and families are torn apart by dictators and genocide.
Yes, my life is pretty privileged when I look at the world that way, however I only have my own reality, which is the small community I wander among and the feelings of fatigue and frustration they have experienced over the past two laborious years.
The obvious frustrations that spring to mind are the lockdowns and the separation from family, friends and visitors from Melbourne who form one of our local major economic drivers. The second, among a growing list, is the state of the electricity.
I have had many messages from Powercor stating that the power is out at my address (duh) and will be restored in two, four, oh no, make that eight hours, but the message I received today was particularly frightening and damning of the corporate conglomerate. And yes, it is a conglomerate. Powercor and CitiPower are simply subsidiaries of parent companies Spark Infrastructure, Cheung Kong Holdings and Victoria Power Networks Pty Ltd. The company owns and maintains power lines, substations and street lights and also manages the largest electricity distribution network in Victoria.
But to my point, the message that I received was tantamount to a little bureaucrat running down the street throwing their hands up in the air and screaming from the top of their lungs “I give up”.
The message was: “We#re (sic) facing significant challenges with widespread faults and extensive damageon (sic) our network. We are continuing to respond to faults but may not be able to restore power to you today. We apologise for this inconvenience and will provide more information as soon as possible.”
Now to put this into context the power at my joint was fine and going strong and there was no rhyme nor reason for this message, except maybe it was a sign of things to come later in the day. With that in mind I quickly topped up the generator which allows us here at TL HQ to limp along on pared-down power.
It seems that we may only be a little over an hour’s drive from Melbourne CBD, who for the most part enjoy an uninterrupted supply, but we are about 50 years behind in infrastructure with barely an underground powerline in sight or as it turns out, out of sight.
This begs the question, what is to happen to us as our community grows with all the new treechangers running away from the ‘burbs to our piece of Utopia and leaning heavily on our power supply?
Get it together Powercor rant over…