Storm of 13-14 February

A fair thunderstorm looked to be heading our way in the evening of 13 February. Although rain hadn't got to Mallacoota by 2130, the power went off. I suspect we had been running on the battery for about 6 hours by then but such info is not shared with Ausnet customers.

I woke at 0300 on the 14th with the power still out and decided to check the Outage Tracker. It wasn't working but there was hysteria in the media on the morning of the 14th implying that of the 500,000 places without power, they were going to be off for days or weeks. As the Telstra phones and internet were also out, no one could do any better than that in the way of information. We noticed many garbage bins had blown over as we did our morning walk.

So we headed for Canberra. As we passed through Cooma (3/4 of the trip) we got a text saying power was back on! (Had we known that was likely (or even possible) we'd have stayed as we don't want to be at our apartment over the coming weekend as the ACT Labour/Greens Government are running a huge, noisy EthnoFest (I'm feeling polite) in the park across the street and the noise will be appalling.) I think we will be going back on Friday 16th even though we need to be back in Canberra on the 20th due to an appointment to repair a couple of blinds - which was booked for 8 February but Watson Blinds changed the date as someone got crook.

The overall situation late on 14 Feb is summarised in this post on the ABC site.  Key info in it is that most of the problems are not due to fallen towers or Loy Yang shutting down but a myriad of local issues combining.  I have since gone to what appears to be the Ausnet Outage Tracker (albeit with an unusual URL) and a lot of outages are not due to be fixed until 17 February and others have no completion date.  So:

1. Mallacoota has been very lucky; and
2. On balance I think we made a rational choice, but wish we'd stayed in 'coota,