Jan 17, 2007, 17:31
This summer season has been particularly harsh for us in the state of Victoria - for a start we have been having a really bad drought over the last year or so, and our water supplies are scraping the bottom. We've been on water restrictions for months, which basically means no car washes and watering our gardens on specified days (Tuesday and Saturday for me).
The dry season has also brought bushfires to the regional parts of Victoria - this season has been one of the worst. The firefighters are doing an awesome job in containing numerous outbreaks blaze, but many properties and homes have been lost.
The day before last, the fires burnt through a power corridor to a neighbouring state, which tripped a safety cutoff and shut down power to a third of the state for about half a day. That was quite an ordeal - some parts of Melbourne had power and went on unaffected (me, thankfully) while others experienced public transport outages, hospitals and ICUs going into panic mode, traffic jams due to traffic lights being out, sweltering conditions from lack of air conditioning, and many businesses losing refrigerated stock (think restaurants, etc.)
There was speculation in the media yesterday too that there might be permanent electricity bans put in place - where at home, no air conditioning can be used, video cameras can't be charged, and get this -- computers and sound systems can't be turned on!
Thankfully the government issued a statement last night saying that there won't be any such bans, but that got me thinking. With digital cameras, PCs etc, we have become so dependent on power. What if we couldn't charge our cameras, and couldn't turn our PC's on to edit our photos? Could it herald a shift back to film photography? :o
The dry season has also brought bushfires to the regional parts of Victoria - this season has been one of the worst. The firefighters are doing an awesome job in containing numerous outbreaks blaze, but many properties and homes have been lost.
The day before last, the fires burnt through a power corridor to a neighbouring state, which tripped a safety cutoff and shut down power to a third of the state for about half a day. That was quite an ordeal - some parts of Melbourne had power and went on unaffected (me, thankfully) while others experienced public transport outages, hospitals and ICUs going into panic mode, traffic jams due to traffic lights being out, sweltering conditions from lack of air conditioning, and many businesses losing refrigerated stock (think restaurants, etc.)
There was speculation in the media yesterday too that there might be permanent electricity bans put in place - where at home, no air conditioning can be used, video cameras can't be charged, and get this -- computers and sound systems can't be turned on!
Thankfully the government issued a statement last night saying that there won't be any such bans, but that got me thinking. With digital cameras, PCs etc, we have become so dependent on power. What if we couldn't charge our cameras, and couldn't turn our PC's on to edit our photos? Could it herald a shift back to film photography? :o
