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As long as it’s sharp, starts, has enough grunt and is safe I don’t care
Chatting with my buddy Clark from Bennachie Bike Bothy sounds pretty tough in Aberdeenshire, but also sounds a lot like people aren't getting off their backsides and helping themselves in many cases! Overall though sounds like a sterling job being done in the 'Shire to help out the local communities and get things back on track.
Clark and the team have done a sterling job gathering supplies and distributing out to the area setting them selves up as a drop in centre.
There is an aspect of folk not even bothering to report faults. One of my neighbours is having a moan they have no power -the faults not logged on the system.
They didn't realise they were house 1 of 1 on the end of that line that had no power *someone else will do it*
Does anyone know if the Puffer course has been impacted?
The power companies are doing an amazing job, given the pure scale and damage done. Still a few locations around here without power, they’ve been told maybe Friday. Even parts of Alnwick high street and houses behind it only came back on last night.
Does anyone know if the Puffer course has been impacted?
I don't think so. A friend of mine went round it last night and didn't mention any issues.
but also sounds a lot like people aren’t getting off their backsides and helping themselves in many cases!
Parents of one of my team at work are from the 'shire. Apparently they and neighbours have been out and cleaned up access roads - handsaws, some chainsaws, lots of folk using caravan/camper/BBQ to make meals, warmth and cuppas, and sharing the help out., taking elderly to appointments etc.
One set of neighbours though is resolutely sat in a cold dark house moaning that the council and energy companies are crap - and then not turning out to help anyone else who is actually getting on with things as they can...
Does anyone know if the Puffer course has been impacted?
I don’t think so. A friend of mine went round it last night and didn’t mention any issues.
So I'll need to find my own excuse for bailing out rather than being offered one on a plate.
It’s been lively for a bit round this manor. Only just got online as we’ve finally relented and moved into the Swan at newby bridge.
Should be back on temp power Friday afternoon. It’s been a mess. 40 trees fallen on the Lane to our place. That takes a bit of clearing.
Still it’ll be sorted soon enough.
Can you imagine if this was Cambridgeshire and North London, the BBC would have multiple presenters out and rolling live newsfeeds…
Stonehaven area off again yesterday till noon tomorrow apparently.
BBC Scotland news on Friday had a silly reporter doing a live report from somewhere very windy. It was lashing down and she had on a down jacket. No idea what point was being made apart from its bloody windy. Finished with "police are advising people not to travel" hopefully the reporter and crew lived in that town.
BBC Scotland news on Friday had a silly reporter doing a live report from somewhere very windy
The one I saw ...it was a he and he does live locally.
A Northern Powergrid van is on the hillside below my house... could it be? Will I be reunited with electricity? Only time will tell...
Still a few homes off up here and tragically one death, possibly due to no power and heating. 😞
🙁
News at lunchtime indicated the army were being involved?
I appreciate they may not be able to provide all the specialised support needed, but we do seem to consistently leave it very late to involve a national resource of fit, active and available pool of people who xan follow instructions.
Still a few homes off up here and tragically one death, possibly due to no power and heating. 😞
😞
A friend of mine in Ford said he knew of one elderly lady who'd been found, alive thankfully, after a fall at the weekend by someone in a 4x4 checking remote houses
I appreciate they may not be able to provide all the specialised support needed, but we do seem to consistently leave it very late to involve a national resource of fit, active and available pool of people who xan follow instructions.
As pointed out by our local councillor, they’ve been avails and offered from the start but they’re not trained up to deal with dealing with power lines.
We are back on as of yesterday afternoon, it’s taken a bit of time but ENWL have been pretty good with comms and making sure hot food was available after a bit of a slow start.
I appreciate they may not be able to provide all the specialised support needed, but we do seem to consistently leave it very late to involve a national resource of fit, active and available pool of people who xan follow instructions.
They don't deploy for free and they cost a lot. All goes on your council tax bill.
On a related note, it doesn't affect me much as we're pretty self sufficient (Now have boiler and pumps wired into the genny too so we're kind of back online in most ways) but it was noticeable that when I have received 'welfare' calls from NPG they couldn't get off the phone fast enough without even asking if we needed anything. It made me chuckle that the welfare call consisted of
'Hi its NPG, this is a welfare call. Is your power Back on?'
'Nope, not yet'
'OK I will make a note of that, thanks for taking the call'
'OK... Bye'
Its good to get a call, but with this approach they're going to miss a lot of vulnerable people too polite or proud to just start having a go at them down the phone (which I suspect is the other response they'll get).
Ben, There is a register of vulnerable customers (the PSR) so we should be able to prioritise understanding who is vulnerable. We won’t, in the quarter of a million premises were off supply, always get it right - but we are trying. There’s There’s around 2,500 NPg employees and a good proportion of them were out in the field or running the operational control centres (plus contractors and guys we’ve call on from other DNOs under the mutual support arrangements - you may have seen pictures of UKPN vans). Probably a couple of hundred of our people were (are) doing those call backs. When they know your off they don’t want to chat, they want to update the info being fed to the field staff as to where to focus efforts. It might sound abrupt, but it’s very tired people working flat out who just want a specific piece of information so we can sort the problem.
My own staff have been working 16 hour days since last Friday now.
As of last night over 230,000 premises had had their power restored - a think it’s around 233,000 now. We’re working on the rest.
And once we do, there will still be a good deal of network rebuilding to do, and a lot of work for me to understand how we reduce the chances of this sort of thing happening again.
For us the 2015 Leeds floods affected supplies less than the 2007 Sheffield and Hull floods which in turn had less effect than the 2000 Selby floods - albeit the 2007 floods did cover more regions - because of the network and asset changed we made.
We do care, we do listen, we do learn and we do act.
I’ll feedback your comments to the lady who runs the call centre.
PS - I got a “your bike is being built” email. Thanks 👍
And I didn’t want to sound quite as grumpy as I did.
Frustration on my part as, for good reason, I’m not as involved as I was in those floods in 2000, 2007 and 2015.
There are photos at work going around of what look like a 132kv steel pylon toppled over and the power cables have pulled down phone lines!
There was a better one but I can't find it...
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At a guess that’s a 66kV Riley and Neate.
Looks too small to be 132kV, but it could be the photo.
If it’s north east England I’m probably right, Scotland I’m probably wrong.
A week without power now for some of our friends & others locally. Still no phone lines either for some, but water for most came back on Tuesday night. Has been snow lying for 3 of those 7 days and 2 others below freezing at times - there is a real risk for vulnerable people in this situation. I know of one person (in their 60s, mobility issues, lives alone but can't move out as has animals to look after...) who resorted to sitting in the car overnight with the engine running while it was charging up their phone as it was warmer than the house. And they could then get through on the emergency response line at 2 in the morning.
I appreciate that there is a lot to deal with and anyone on the ground is run of their feet doing dangerous work in difficult conditions, but communication has been poor. I'm on email/text updates for several people who have no phone/internet access (some with no mobiles or mobile signal etc) and have heard nothing from Northern Powergrid directly for 90% of them. One has been visited (today, 6 days after reporting power lines down and at the time burning the ground around them) and another earlier in the week, but the rest have to rely on hearsay. Latest website updates are suggesting the 5th at 10pm for most to be reconnected - but then that has been revised back more or less every 24hrs so far.
It's curious that Boris Johnson could find his way to Northumberland in order to wander maskless around a local hospital when there were important debates on MP's conduct in the Commons, but there has been a visible lack of any serious political response until very recently. NE Scotland got the army involved earlier in the week (albeit slowly), Durham declared a state of emergency (Thurs?), Northumberland finally making some noises about it today. The only representative to come out with credit that I've heard of (indirectly) is a local independent councillor who seems to have been working hard to help out directly and put pressure on the authorities/local MPs to actually do something useful. Hopefully it might sharpen some minds when they turn to the ballot box.
We had a builder out today to look at some renovation works in our house. His electricity has been off since Friday and NP have told him they might be reconnected by the 8th. He lives fairly close to Newcastle airport so not rural at all.
Hats off to all the NP people working round the clock to get everyone out of this mess and all the people helping those who've been affected.
NPG came round yesterday afternoon and did some work on our substation and woo! We're back on.
Thanks Iain and everyone at NPG.
Not a problem Ben. It’s our what we’re here to do. (And I didn’t do much personally)
Good news - Do we know how many are still off as we head into the next couple of wild days?
Some folks must be working around the clock at the moment....
I think we were at around 3000 yesterday afternoon (from 240,000). The issue is we’re now chasing the smallest faults and each repair is half a dozen here, 20 there, so progress on the numbers is slow.
My guys are now at the command centre (hosted by the fire brigade) liaising with the wider response.
Party time here now too. Everyone in the immediate vicinity back on since lunchtime today which is a relief. The map is looking a lot better than 48hrs ago now and fingers crossed the majority left will get supply sorted or generators to them soon.
I did laugh when a couple of the guys brought in from the deep south admitted that the whole experience of working on the hills with snow every day was something of a culture shock. One of them said he'd never seen snow like it. 😀 Fair play to them though, it has been pretty nasty at times and they were still battling on with good humour.
Silly question - when poles / pylons are down like the photo above, do you put up temporary poles or what? Is most of the network a net so you can lose single lines or is it common for communities to be at the end of a single line of poles?
Looks like a really hard problem getting things back on, well done to all involved.
Not a silly question @Murray - but a complex answer that’s a bit yes, a bit no, and a bit depends.
There’s a suite of standards and guidance built up over the last 100 years to try and address your query, and a few more pages will be written on the back of this event.
P2/7 (the 7th version of P2) gives guidance on how many lines can be knocked out / out for maintenance before people go off and how long you have to get them back and governs the basic network design. That standard suffices pretty well 99.9% of the time. Last week the event was so far outside what the network is designed for as to be laughable.
But according to the lady from the Met Office on PM the last storm like this was 1984 (not the smaller one that hit the south east - that was 1987 I believe) and before that the great storm in 1953.
Building a network that stands up to an event that happens once every 35 years is expensive. Or at least it has been. I’m working on some things that might make it more cost effective in future.
Thanks IGM, I slept through the 1987 storm in Basingstoke, just surprised about the lack of traffic when I woke up. It did bring down an ancient yew at my dad's surgery in Maidstone and the whole wood next to where he lived at Detling but I can't remember much infrastructure disruption. I guess it's easier in densely populated areas with lots of possible paths.
And as you say, storms in the north and near coasts tend to be stronger.
Densely populated areas tend to use underground cable not overhead lines too.
More expensive but better suited to an urban environment.
not the smaller one that hit the south east – that was 1987 I believe
the real damage in the 87 storm wasn’t that widespread. It was down to something called a sting jet.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/types-of-weather/wind/sting-jet
The sting jet does undoubtedly add to the damage but it's embedded within the wider storm system. 87J storm was still quite a large storm system and continued to cause damage in Europe after it left us. These systems can be hundreds of miles wide.
Sting jets do not guarantee massive damage either. Storm/Tempête Alex in France last year is an example of this. Very high localised windspeeds were observed but the wider storm wasn't a big one... But if you're caught in it and your home is damaged it's a disaster for you as an individual/family
That’s was my point, the damage was pretty localised and severe. We had no power for ~10 days but it was October and pretty mild from what I remember. I remember barbecuing in the what remained of the garage.
87 storm wasn't localised. There was significant damage from Southampton to Essex, 15 milion felled trees, Sevenoaks famously became 1 oak, etc. In total it caused billions in damage across Europe.
In 1990 there was a bigger Strom named Daria. 90 and 99 were terrible winter storm seasons and thankfully since then there hasn't been a very large storm in the European context. Storm Ciara/Sabine in Feb 2020 caused €2 billion in damage across Europe but was not considered a large storm when compared to the 90s events
87 storm wasn’t localised. There was significant damage from Southampton to Essex,
sounds pretty localised to me
Yup NPG teams are doing an amazing job the huge area they’ve had to cover and very remote locations, wouldn’t make it easy.