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Gerry Patterson. The world's most humble blogger |
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The Tempest |
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Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 23:01:03 +1100This morning I awoke to a strangely silent room. Strange, because usually my radio is blaring out the news from ABC RN. This silence had alerted my wife to the fact that something was wrong and her exclamation a few seconds earlier had awakened me also. |
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If I had been able to hear it, the radio would have informed me that Melbourne had just experienced the most rainfall in 24 hours since records began.
But I couldn't hear it, because my house, like 120,000 others in the greater Melbourne region was without power!
I rushed into the office and switched off all the power points. If my hard disks had survived the initial crash, there was no point risking further damage if the power did not come back up cleanly.
From a battery operated radio, I learned that roads leading into the CBD were blocked and public transport was experiencing major blockages.
As it turned out, our local primary school had been flooded and was closed. In nearby streets, several giant trees had fallen crushing cars, power lines and blocking streets. I heard news reports about hail and snow! Even for Melbourne, that is a bit extreme (for February).
A client that I went to see that morning in a nearby suburb was sitting in his office, without lights, or computers. We discussed planned changes to his database with pen and paper only.
This remarkable day and the cold 12.9 degree change had arrived on the heels of a sweltering 36 degree day that on the previous day threatened to shut down the computing facilities where I was working, as the chillers connected to the air conditioning system went into a vicious feedback loop, struggling to keep up with the heat.
My own site was down for almost seven and a half hours. Thankfully I did not lose any data. I say thankfully because the outage occurred just prior to the scheduled backups. If I had been forced to restore, I would have lost an entire day's work.