outback to jungle

Musings on experiences of volunteering in Papua New Guinea with some gratuitous domestic social and public comment

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

only eight hour blackout

It appears I exaggerated when I described the 36 hour blackout from early Saturday morning to late Sunday evening. The Post Courier, Monday p3 in a "briefly column" described the blackout in the following terms.
LAE city in the dark.
LAE city was hit by intermittent blackouts in some suburbs lasting eight hours over the weekend. The blackouts were due to the cleaning of the Ramu hydro turbines by PNG Power. A PNG Power official said said the work was to have ended at midnight last night. The blackouts have also affected several suburbs which were experiencing water problems. A city resident said, "Lae used to be a pot hole city. Now it is a blackout city too".
End of story - that's it. 12 and a half lines. No word about the lack of warning, advance notice, apology for not letting anyone know what was going on, inconvenience. Nothing. I must reinvent the word intermittent. When I can't cook toast at 8am in the morning and the water runs out and I eat by candle light at night and can't watch the Commonwealth games and scare myself by walking upstairs with a candle about midnight the same day, and there's no water the next day and my fan doesn't go on and I can't watch the commonwealth games again, by my calculation that is more than eight hours. Reporter, get your facts straight and be a bit more hard hitting to get some accountability from these people. Furthermore it was a national who told me PNG Power should be called PNG Powerless. Do you think he only had an eight hour blackout too?

1 Comments:

At 1:54 PM, Blogger outback to jungle said...

I enjoyed reading this blog. It made me feel more patriotic. I wish there were more blogs like this. Thank you for keeping me informed and entertained.

 

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