Comment posted Candles in the wind set fire to Scottish Hydro by Treblet.
Once again the Met Office have been caught napping when it comes to them issuing severe weather warnings. www.magicseaweed.com were showing a pressure chart of a severe storm throughtout Scotland as early as Thursday 29th December 2011 for the following Tuesday 3rd January 2012. On Friday 30th December 2011 the Met Office website was showing NO severe weather warnings for the following 5 days up to 3rd January 2012.
On Sunday 1st January 2012 the Met Office had a Yellow amber warning for windy conditions in England on Tuesday 3rd January and nothing in Scotland.
By Monday this had been upgraded to a Yellow amber warning for windy conditions for the following day throughout the whole of Scotland apart from the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland. They also had a red alert for snow throughout the centre of Scotland.
I sent the Met Office an email on Friday 30th December 2011 advising them that their website was advising gusts of wind on the following Tuesday 3rd January 2012 of 71mph in Tiree, 66mph in Oban, 58mph in Glasgow, Newcastle 50mph, Birmingham 48mph and even London 51mph. The final sentence of my email was; Please update your 5 day severe weather warning charts to give the public advance notice of the bad weather due to hit the UK on Tuesday 3rd January 2012.
All I received was a “bog standard” email reply from the Met Office. Surely it is time for heads to roll at the Met Office especially when members of the public are giving them help.
Treblet also commented
- Newsroom.
I do not know how the people in the Kilhoman area coped but I suspect that they had to make the best of it. Perhaps they had peat or coal fires with a back boiler which would keep them warm and provide a supply of hot water. - The main problem I found was the total lack of communication from SSE with their emergency helpline continually advising customers to phone back for an update in 4 hours time. Apart from my initial call on Tuesday morning was unable to speak to a person in the Portsmouth call centre until the Thursday morning. This person advised that they hoped to get everyone in the Rhinns area back online by Thursday evening which unfortunately did not prove to be the case.
There was no communication or help from either our local councillor(s) or community councillors.
Lessons must learnt from these major power cuts although I am not hopeful it will be any better if the same thing happens again.
Alex Salmond has been strangely quite regarding the crisis. - Alex Mckay.
Goodness knows where you get your information from but it is certainly from a very unreliable source.
Port Ellen was without power for several hours and Bowmore had no power for about 8 hours. We were without power for 53 hours. The residents of Port Wemyss and Portnahaven were without power from 6.30am on Tuesday until sometime on yesterday (Saturday) a period of at least 96 hours but probably over 100 hours. The residents of Port Wemyss and Portnahaven also had no water as their water supply is required to be pumped by electricity. The residents of Kilhoman had their electricity reconnected last night after being without power for over 108 hours.
The diesel generating power station was of no use as the cables were either blown down or damaged.
I am sure that the residents of Bute despite being visited by the tv cameras were not as long without power as some parts of Islay.
I look forward to your apology on ForArgyll. - Readers of ForArgyll should look at www.magicseaweed.com click on charts then click pressure and click on the drop down showing the list of dates back to 10th December 2011.
I suggest that you click Thursday 29th Decemver 2011 and follow the 3 hourly pressure chart for the following 180 hours (seven days and twelve hours). When you reach Tuesday 3rd January 2012 you will see the developing area of low pressure which whistled through Scotland that day. How the Met Office cannot forecast it correctly when magicseaweed.com can do it six days in advance is unbelieveable. - The Rhinns area of Islay suffered several power cuts last year outwith the stormy weather due to SSE’s make do and mend (sticking plaster) approach to the electricity cables serving that area. The various power cuts lasted up to almost three hours in length. There was even a power cut of two hours on the 1st of July 2010 which is Midsummer day.
This part of Islay has few trees so they cannot be blamed for causing the power cuts. In my opinion the blame lies with SSE who have not kept the infrastructure up to date and are more interested in paying an increasing annual dividend to their shareholders. According to the SSE website the current annual dividend payment is 75p per ordinary share.
The directors of SSE should be cutting the ordinary dividend to shareholders and using these funds to ensure that the Scottish Hydro Electric infrastructure is totally up to date to meet the demands of their customers.
Recent comments by Treblet
- Uists get involved in the issue of the Campbeltown to Ardrossan ferry
pm.
You obviously do not travel on a Calmac ferry service.
Since December 2012 if a ferry sailing which includes all ferry services in the EU is delayed or cancelled then the ferry company has to provide refreshments and/or overnight accomodation for all passengers depending on how long the ferry is delayed. Full details can be obtained from Calmac or any Calmac ferry office.
This has been implemented by the EU. - SNP tightens party grip on local councillors in further chaos
I suggest that all the councillors in Argyll & Bute resign their seats as the electorate could easily manage without them. - Amazon given government grants
Waterstones and Amazon charge publishers 70% of the cover price of a book that they sell. - Amazon given government grants
Amazon have a large warehouse in Dunfermline.
The Scottish Government gave Amazon £10 Million in grants last year and Alex Salmond says that he is not going to demand that Amazon refund the money.
If Amazon want to route their profits through Luxemburg then I suggest that they have their warehouses based in Luxemburg as well where it would cost Amazon a lot more to post their orders to the UK. - SNP departures from administration – was money a factor?
Lowry.
It was the electorate of Argyll & Bute who are to blame. They voted in this bunch of incompetant councillors.
If these incompentant councillors were honourable people they would resign as Argyll & Bute councillors and force a series of by elections.
However there is no chance of that happening as this incompetant bunch will happilly take their councillors’ salary for the next four years until the council elections in May 2016.
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That is an absolutely outrageous article Newsie and a slur on the brave, yes brave, engineers who were out in gale or near gale force winds repairing faults. Did you venture out
of your ivory castle at all during this period?
What place is personal reponsibility going to have in your vision of a new utopian Scotland? People who live in country areas supplied by overhead power lines, and that includes me by the way, should realise that the occasional storm will bring outages and plan accordingly so that they have backup systems in place.
I would also say that the repairs were probably slowed down by people demanding information on specific faults diverting attention from the jobs in hand.
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For JimB: The only response this self-serving mischief deserves is to say that you shame yourself by being prepared to distort facts even in a ongoing emergency situation in which tens of thousands are really suffering simply in order to insult For Argyll. We are, as always, untouched by the spite but appallled by your priorities.
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“It is also imperative for the company, in the interests of its credibility, to make public detailed information….”
I would have thought that perhaps they had much more important imperatives. Like restoring power to all affected homes for example rather than responding to the squeals of the self-important bawbag that is Newsie.
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For Simon: If you are prepared simply to accept what you are given, regardless of its fitness for purpose, that’s your choice.
But we speak for the many who have been unnecessarily and additionally stressed an distressed by Scot Hydro’s incompetent and irresponsible information handling in this crisis. We are still wading through a forest of emails on the subject.
You may well also live in an area largely unaffected by the lower cuts and have little understanding of the reality of the situation.
You are also either astonishingly naive if you imagine that Scottish Hydro only employ engineers who also handle public information – or mischievous in implying that Scottish Hydro’s provision to their customers the information they certainly held would have diverted energy away from the repair side of the emergency.
The company – like all such – employs a considerable team simply to handle public information. But as with so much of the degraded public culture we too easily accept, it is the box-ticking of giving out ‘information’ that matters rather then the quality and the usefulness of that information.
In this case it was the management of information and the responsibility to do so in the interests of distressed customers that was totally – and we mean totally – absent. It would have cost no more in time, money and effort to provide a responsible information service than it cost to waste the time of the team they have and to waste the goodwill of their clientele. And if, by chance, the company at any level did not actually have any more information than it gave out, there could be no more serious indication of failed management.
Scottish Hydro has two call centres in Perth and two in Portsmouth. (The company is owned by Scottish and Southern.) During the crisis, which also affected the south of England, call from customers without supply were directed to whichever call centre was under least pressure. From our experience, the staff manning the lines at both were universally understanding and universally uninformed. Perth knew no more than Portsmouth and, as a side issue – knew no more about the geography and towns of Argyll than did Portsmouth..
This was not a problem with staff at call centres. It was a management problem, The staff knew no more than the callers. In the end it doesn’t matter much to any of us where the information comes from as long as it is the information we need and is correct and up to date.
Staff at Portsmouth and at Perth told us that they had made representations ot their line managers that this was not the way to handle information in such an emergency – and were ignored. Their managers themselves were taking orders from further up the line.
And of course it was also a mischievous falsification to suggest – on no basis of evidence whatsoever from our article 0- that we wre being critical of the engineers in the field. Who would do their job? Everyone who gets their power restored is immediately grateful specifically to them. (It is, in fact engineers in the field, over several areas within and outwith Argyll, who are unhappy with company’s maintenance procedures.)
Your childish insults have no impact on us whatsoever, Simon but they do demonstrate that your priority is to indulge yourself in such trivia rather than to support Argyllachs who genuinely suffered and are still suffering during this emergency. You obviously neither live in nor have any interest in the Isle of Bute, for example.
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Providing accurate information to anyone who asks MUST be a primary priority of any public utility company nowadays; and answering the telephones at a call centre (wherever) doesn’t take engineers off the work in the field.
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We are lead to believe that power failings happen, so why dont they bury the lines as they do in Germany and other less windy countries..
Hydro are contemptable ,inept ..No grudge with the Engineers but the fat arsed cats at the top..who only look at the share price..
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@JimB and @Simon
I didn’t read any of this article as an attack on the engineers. I think we all recognise what a tough and difficult job they have in these storms.
But are we really saying there are no support staff (I’m talking of office staff, not field engineers) available in Hydro who could not be re-deployed to compile and publish information on where the outages are and the order these failures were being tackled? With mobile computing and everything – is that really too much to ask of the power companies…?
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Ditto the two comments above. However, the final paragraph had me falling off my chair with laughter and I’m still wiping the tears from my eyes. I can’t wait to read the follow-up.
By the way, many off us prepare for such events. I have deliberately installed a multi-fuel burning stove and LPG cooker. (Prior to this I had a standby camping gaz cooker). I use gaz lighting and candles in jars. I contact people by landline or visit to ensure neighbours are all ok. Personal responsibility should be a priority, not constant complaining and whining and living with the unrealistic belief that things would be better with an independent Scotland. Believe me, if that ever comes to fruition, things will be ten times worse!
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This article is clearly written by someone who has no idea how the world works outside writing stories for a website.
Repairing faults like the engineers have encountered over the last few days contains hundreds of variables which affect how long the job will take. It’s pretty much impossible to compile all this information into a message to give to the public. A repair that they think will take half an hour could take up to a day due to unforseen problems.
If they did as you asked and tried to give out accurate times for power being restored you’d just get people complaing that their power hadn’t come back on at 16:34 and 10 seconds like had been promised and they’ll have to wait a few more hours.
I think next time we have a storm like this whoever wrote this article should spend a few days with one of the repair teams so that they can see how the real world works and how the information they want given out is nigh on impossible to compile. Once all this is over and the electricity companies have time to breath maybe you should send this article to them to get their response. Maybe ask them if they could get that large glowing thing that comes out at night and put it on a stick for you.
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For Bob: We were not saying that the engineers have an easy tiime – far from it; or that fully accurate predictions are possible. Everyone understands the realities.
We were saying and continue to say that those without power should have been given – should always be given – the best available estimates on a regular basis.
Here are some indications of the sortt of information that could be honestly given and would help folk enormously to make decisions about what to do in their household.
‘Look, our engineers are concentrated on major problems at x, y and z. It’s unlikely we’ll get to your neck of the woods before tomorrow evening or the following day. Then we’ve got to see the lie of the land, what it’s going to take and get down to it.’
‘A gang is on the way to your area. It will be three hours before they get there and they’ll only be able to assess the situation tonight. We’ll ‘have that first assessment about 10.00pm, if you want to ring at 10.15pm. And remember that this estimate may change once they start work at first light.’
Information is our business as it is the business of the major departments in major corporations. We know exactly what we are talking about.
Scottish Hydro were guilty of a major failure of competence in delivery of this vital service in a major emergency.
It is not difficult to devise, stricture and set up the necessary information gathering and transmission routines or to out them into action. It takes no more than skills of a common sense nature and a sound methodology.
We are all entitled to expect such a modest but critical capability and such a service from a major private sector corporation whose handsome and rising prices we pay.
And if you’re issuing a challenge – name the date and place. We’ll be there and we’ll prove the point.
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“Look, our engineers are concentrated on major problems at x, y and z. It’s unlikely we’ll get to your neck of the woods before tomorrow evening or the following day. Then we’ve got to see the lie of the land, what it’s going to take and get down to it.”
I think there’s a very good reason why they don’t do that and that is that many people aren’t going to be happy with that. If people are just told that they’re working on it and power will be back on asap then they’re more likely to accept that. If they’re told what you’ve suggested above a lot of people would hit the roof and jam the lines complaining. In this case complaining would do nothing as it’s not going to magic more engineers or calm the weather. I hate to say it but sometimes withholding information is the best thing to do. If you can’t give people the full view then a murky half view isn’t always better than nothing.
Alas, I am not issuing a challenge but maybe if you speak to the Hydro they might let you. Which is perhaps what you should have done before publishing this article to get their side of it. I think it’s terrible that you publish opinion pieces like this and don’t give the other party chance to put their point of view across.
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The article resulted in some discussion in our household and we concluded:
1. The the newsroom bloggers (They) are of a generation that believes in a nanny state and does not seem to recognise personal responsibility.
2. They would rather focus on what They can’t do rather than what They can do in such circumstances.
3. Hence They wish to blame other people rather than have worked out a risk analysis for their own family/business and put in place appropriate measures.
4. Because of their attitude they have not recognised all the good work that was and is still being done in local communities, especially by A&B council and other organisations.
5. They believe that all their whining will make a difference should a similar event take place in the future.
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At the risk of being called mischievous, it seems to me that we may all have to get used to planned losses of power supplies in a few year’s time. In my view, the short-sighted energy policy of the current Scottish Government is likely to result in a series of pre-planned rolling electricity ‘black-outs’. Remember the miner’s strike in 1974 when non-essential commercial users were only allowed to consume electricity for three days each week in order to conserve electricity? Domestic users were also similarly affected. At least we will know in advance when it is Argyll’s turn to be ‘switched off’, and can plan appropriately.
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The point of the article was to highlight the lack of information crucial for planning to cope with the loss of power in both business and domestic scenarios. Newsroom is right, the information was inadequate. This has nothing to do with the people on the ground struggling to reconnect the wires.
I was in Perthshire during the storm. The guys who came to mend the wires where I was staying had driven up from Southampton the previous day. They had fixed five faults before they got to us and they worked two hours in the dark to reconnect us. They were lovely chaps and we gave them a cuppa before they left.
I can remember when the Hydro was ‘the Hydro’. When it was local, when you spoke to someone you knew if your power was down. Not only was everyone helpful, they could tell you in great detail what the problem was and when it would be fixed – if you asked them.
Then, the Hydro became not a company but a ‘brand’. Owned and administered by people in the deep south of England. All of us here have met such people and know just how rude, uncaring and arrogant they can be. They saw the Hydro as a cash cow – after all, the price of rain doesn’t increase with the ‘markets’ greed. They can boast of being ‘Green’ too. They are not really interested in the people of our wild lands.
So, good on For Argyll for airing their inadequacies. People in the UK as a whole are too compliant when it comes to bad service. We don’t complain, pay daft prices and accept c**p goods and service.
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As someone has been dealing with this remotely, fortunately my home only suffered exceptionally minor damage despite loosing 3 trees in my garden, I’ve been desperate for info. During the for argyll blackout I discovered Helensburgh tv at urtv. Whilst it won’t replace the in-depth discussion here it provides a balanc and a welcome visual reminder of home.
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Up here in ma Glen, its so peaceful ye ken, ye can hear the thoughts run through yer head.
And at night unless there’s a Silvery Moon, its so dark when ye go tae yer bed.
But in Winter time, when its no sae fine and in the middle o the night ye waken.
Wae the howlin winds and the Snow comin doon and ye can feel that the whole hoose is shaken.
Well Monday night, was one o they nights and a woke at an unearthly hour.
It was blowin a gail as the snow turned tae hail and once again, had nae power.
A was in a rage ,why, in this day and age, the power folks, cant get it together.
Us up in the hills and we do pay oor bills, but we always loose out in bad weather.
A gave them a phone and A had a good moan and their reply, its always the same.
“We are workin flat out tae sort the faults out, its fallen trees on the lines that’s to blame” So here I am, tryin tae stay warm, and stay calm writin by candle light.
No Feckbook, No Telly, no hot food in ma belly, they treat us country folks like Sh/te.
A was sittin here aboot an hour ago and the power company give me a phone, Hello he says Mr Robertson Sir, is yer power no yet back oan.
No a said, a was goin tae bed, as a thought aboot us ye’d forgotten.
Ma freezers thawed oot, will need tae through it awe oot as the whole feckin lot is just rotten.
He said “Am sendin up three men, tae yer Glen, tae see what the problem could be, A ken that its dark but they’ve got torches, so the will be able tae see”.
And to my surprise, and a tell ye no lies they were up here within the hour.
And before too long, they found oot what was wrong, and noo after three days, ave got Power.
Aye its great livin up in the Boonies, but it does have its ups and doons.
Ye don’t get the same attention, as the folks that live doon in the toons.
But A can tell ye that am Happy, it’s the Mountain life fur me
Noo am just goin tae put on the kettle, and have a wee cup o tea.
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For Charlie Robertson: Thank you. This about sums it all up.
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What would you do differently if you were given all the information?
If you are not prepared that iis your problem. Personally I prepare for storms in advance. I have a gas cooker and a wood burning stove,candles and a couple of paraffin lamps. When the BBC forecasts gales I turn up the freezers to get them as cold as possible and have a stock of tinned and dry food so that the freezers stay shut. When the power goes off I am prepared to sit things out.
I expect the electricity company to throw all its energies into repairing the faults and not waste time answering telephones to crank callers, who incidentally are increasing costs and hence bills for everyone else.
Repairs have to be done from the main grid outwards so if you are in a periphheral area you will have to wait longer, that comes with the territory.
A lot of the overhead line checking is done by helicopters and these can only operate upto certain wind speeds and the wind kept on coming back after quite long lulls.
Have patience or go and live in one of the cities.
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The storm last May demonstrated to me that the need for information can be a two-way process; living at the end of a rural power line, I discovered that the engineers had worked their way down from the main line fixing faults and were unaware of three houses at the very end still without power until one of us called by their local base (rather than phoning Perth) until we found someone to talk to, and the fault was then fixed almost immediately. I might be wrong, but it seems that even in this day and age Scottish & Southern might not be equipped with the technology to ‘interrogate’ consumer units down the line to find out which ones are still dead. If this is so, it’s rather surprising as I understand that local hydro electric stations have been controlled down power lines for very many years now, from well before the electricity system was privatised.
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If you are referring to my attempt to add a bit of humour JimB
That is all it is HUMOUR.. If not I apologise…
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Newsie – in your predicatable diatribe at my comments you say – “on no basis of evidence whatsoever from our article 0- that we wre being critical of the engineers in the field. ”
Actually, Newsie if you read my post you would plainly see that I didn’t suggest you were being critical of enigneers. But, that wee snidey dig prompted mer to go back and read your article again because I was sure you did indeed have a pop the engineers – and guess what?????
“Seven hours later the number of engineers was still trumpeted as 400 and the number of faultrs had come down to – 83. It us legitimate to ask quite how 400 engineers had been deployed to achieve a fault reduction of 7 in 7 hours.”
And lo and behold in the very next paragraph you wrote
“An update 5 or 6 hours later again cited the 400 engineers and gave the number of outstanding faults then as 78. It is also legitimate to ask how 400 engineeers were deployed to have repaired another 5 faults in 5 or 6 hours.”
Are these comments from you not being critical of the engineers??*
Certainly seems so to me.
An apology from yourself would be in order.
*If you weren’t being critical of the engineers with those comments – who were you being critical of? Mmm?
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You are obviously personally annoyed by this situation. The terrible spelling and punctuation attest to that. Your article reads like a rant, rather than coherent journalism. I would point out the following:
1. The company have no idea where all the breaks are. (We were once off for four days, because every single link was damaged over at least three and a half miles or more.) Finding all of these involves people on foot, often in the dark. making observations. Only once each section is fixed, can they be sure there isn’t another fault. Hence vague answers.
2. I have seen crews from Ireland and all over England who have come in to deal with the emergency. This is because the company is multi-national.
3. I know of two instances of land-owners who have made it difficult for trees to be cut/ pruned etc in advance to prevent this sort of damage from happening; and then made it difficult for engineers to make repairs. This might be worth investigating further. (no I will not give details, as that would reveal the source, and these guys are litigious.)
Journalism of the quality above undermines this sites credibility.
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For Andrew Wilson: We apologise for the typos and will now correct them. We were dealing – and still are – with a situation where we had been offline through power loss for three working days and were working fast into the small hours with eyes not yet re-accustomed to light. At least the typos – and we’re sure there’ll be a welter of them – didn’t prevent you form grasping what we were saying – which we continue to say.
As assume that in the 21st century there are system diagnostics that identify the source of supply failures – if not the cause – within a reasonable distance?
A service company, in this case Scottish Hydro, is not simply sending engineers into outer space to see what they can find,. They know the sections of line and/or sub-stations etc they are sending them to investigate. They know approximately when the teams will arrive in their target areas, although not what they will find there and what it will mean for the repairs to be done. They will get fault analyses, calls for additional equipment and other support, estimations and updates on repair times from onsite engineers. All they have to do is transmit these in regular bulletins.
Any major organisation – private or public – that cannot do something as well organsied but essentially simple as this is not fit to be offering us a ‘service’ and taking our money.
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One can send a signal down a wire that will indicate a fault .6 of a mile on. When that fault is fixed, the sender from the same source will say their is another fault .8 of a mile on, .2 of a mile from the first; and so on. Hence, how a large number of engineers could be working for a long time, and still have only appeared to have repaired a few faults. They were constantly finding more.
As to the nationalization of the service: you are 100% right. Clearly, the power network fails every few years or so in extreme conditions. Look at the roads. They are flawless day in and day out. Oh! there’s the pothole in your argument…
The Hydro boys don’t need the Landrovers and chainsaws to get across the rough ground in rural areas and to remove the fallen trees that have snapped the cables. They need them just to travel across Argyll.
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@Newsroom: Your plans are simply not feasible. Engineers need to be left to work on the lines, not keep having to stop working to phone in estimates that aren’t going to be accurate. Who would you have them phone into? The call centres which will be jammed with customers complaining their estimates weren’t accurate or would you have them phone managers? If you want them to call managers then you’re going to need a lot of them to answer calls from 400 engineers which means more staff and more wages and more cost to us. What if a few teams of engineers can’t get through to the main office? Do you want them to stand around and keep trying until they do and not working? Do you want a dedicated person with each team who’s there to phone in reports? Again, more staff, more wages and more cost to us. Maybe you don’t want them to phone in but report using an automatic system of some sort. New system means more money means more cost to us. Or maybe they could text it in using their phones. You ever tried to send a text at pitch black in a gale wearing thick gloves? Plus there’s a good chance any mobile masts will be out too.
This is why I suggested above you go out with teams in the next gale because what you’re suggesting is very easy to suggest sitting at home but very difficult to implement in the field.
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‘these guys are litigious’ – surely the power companies have the statutory right of access to their (our) infrastructure, and of trimming back vegetation that threatens the integrity of the system? If not, the companies and our legislators need to talk to each other, and get their act together.
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The Simon Wormtongue persona, I suspect your big beard (did you colour it to look like a santa?) got in the way of any ability to read the article.
Once again, FA is trying to say something useful and once again your contribution could be described fairly as SweetFA to be charitable. Or just plain stupid to be concise.
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I don’t really see what difference ‘more information’ would have made to the situation. Being prepared in the first place is the only thing that would have made a difference, and if your business revolves around internet connectivity then there is very little you can do – either chill out (pun intended) and wait or get a generator so you are not caught out next time. Power cuts are a feature of rural life in Scotland in the Winter – always have been and probably always will be. This was a particularly severe storm that came soon after the previous one.
One thing we find very handy is keeping an old-style phone to plug in when the power goes off and the DECT phones don’t work.
One thing I don’t think helps much is ranting abut the information provided by the hydro board. Their communication priorities are organising repairs, assisting the emergency services and ensuring provision for the sick and elderly.
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Webcraft
Whilst their engineers were doubtless working hard in exceedingly unpleasant conditions, a flow of information from management would serve to placate paying customers.
This situation has parallels to being stuck at a US airport waiting to board a flight. The airline I was scheduled to fly with were helpful in immediately announcing how long their flight to the UK would be delayed due to snow. I booked a hotel.
Other airlines kept their customers waiting before announcing something I’d known hours earlier. And now, the hotels were full.
Giving accurate information allows the customer to make a decision. A black hole of silence and stalling fails totally, ultimately giving customers a problem.
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I agree totally with ‘webcraft’ as in this part of the country its part and parcel of life, and it should be note that the recent storms and their regularity were exeptional and should reafirm the aforementioned suggestion to be MORE prepared in future.
In addition those of us who are capable should (and in most cases do)ensure that less able neighbours, in towns and rurally are ok. I have found Scottish Hydro to be approachable and give as much info as they can, but wire snapping and cable faults are not a science and in many cases take a frustratingly painstaking research to pinpoint. This work in sometimes bordrline dangerous condidtion deserves great respect from us all, and greeting about communication does no good.
Seldom have i seen Newsroom so excited, its almost like the Council administration (Walsh Morton Macintyre Mackay etc)are to blame or are they (councilors)moonlighting as electric engineers!
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And a Good New Year to you as well Grant – or have I already said that to you…..
*
So you think that when Newsie was being critical of the engineers – who remember drove up from England and then were straight out in foul dangerous weather trying their best to mend mutiple line breaks – that Newsie was being useful??? Muppet.
I must say also that I thought Newsie’s reaction to JimB the very first post was hysterical, misplaced and way OTT. Losing it.
* You’ve tried this nonsense on before Xmas Grant but I still don’t have beard -
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There is far more going on in the repair of power lines than Newsroom is clearly aware from its pathetic and ill-thought-through diatribe. If the engineers on the spot can’t give an estimate of how long it is going to take, then how can someone answering the calls from the public? There were over 10 faults in about 10 miles of overhead cables in one area near where a relative lives and each and every one had to found, visited – often in the middle of muddy fields or woodland – assessed, repaired if possible and then on to the next one. And the weather on Tuesday and Wednesday was hardly helpful. At one point, spare parts were flown in by helicopter, which was also used to fly along the lines looking for faults. And there was a further problem in that area, the mobile phone networks were down so that the engineers on the spot were unable to keep in regular communication either with the people at the generating/switching stations, which is necessary so that repairs can be tested, or to pass on information to the call centre.
Perhaps, Newsroom, you hadn’t given enough consideration to the practicalities of dealing with the aftermath of the severest storm for many years.
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For Alex Mackay: So how, with no communications, were the necessary spares requested and the helicopter commissioned to fly them in?
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Please don’t ask a silly question in order to cover up your own faults, just think first, something you omitted the first time round. While the mobile network might have been down, there is another type of communication that can be used. It’s called a landline telephone and doubtless could be used once an engineer had left his work on the line and driven to the nearest place where he could find a phone in order to discuss the matter of spares with his bosses.
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For Alex Mackay: It never was a silly question and you’ve just answered it – and proved the point we are making. We were pointing out that your claim that communications from the field are impossible was not believable and that your own information made it clear that there are communications. You’re making it overtly clear here that there is always some mode of communication to be used. Of course there is – and the engineers work, of course, necessitates it.
What we are pointing to is a management failure – and a serious one – not an engineering failure. This was the complete absence of adequate information gathering and transmission – and there is no countering that, Alex, however much you try to disguise it by insulting us for standing up for the many who need a voice.
Even if no communication was possible between field engineers and base until the engineers got to the hotel or BandB they were overnighting in – it would be possible then. It is hard to believe that in 2012 there is no internal situation reporting system during major emergencies like this one. There has to be. But what was coming in from the field was not being put to the necessary use of customer information.
The Perth Call Centre told us on Thursday lunchtime that they had had no update since 3.30pm the previous day. Both the Perth Call Centres and the Portsmouth Call Centres told us of evening staff updates that were scheduled and never happened.
It is utterly inconceivable that some in the company did not know what was going on between, for example, 3.30pm on Wednesday and lunchtime the following day. They might not have the full picture on the state of play at all fault locations- although that is hard to believe over that time period – but they would have a swathe of updates to pass on.
This was not happening – at all. The company’s own supposed sources of information to its paying customers were not given the information. People need area specific information.
Any capable school leaver could devise a simple, practical information harvesting and transmission system and of course so could Scottish Hydro’s communications department – if they had thought it was worth bothering about or of they had been required to do so
Rudeness to us does not in any way alter the incontrovertible fact that Scottish Hydro’s management utterly failed its tens of thousands of affected customers when they badly needed whatever simple and honest information that was available. They got none. And for all your bluster you have not pointed to a single instance to refute what we are saying.
Take one obvious example of need. Elderly folk living alone or alone together are the predominant sector of the population in Argyll. The elderly feel the cold more quickly. Many are not in a position to organise their lives around preparing for all eventualities and many have no source of power except electricity. That means no hot drinks, no hot food, no space heating, no warm washing. A fair proportion will also be unwell, suffering from a variety of medical complaints; and an equally fair proportion will have impaired mobility of some kind. Moving about in the dark, possibly carrying candles, brings hazards not unique to the elderly but aggravated for them.
If they are told that their area is unlikely to have its power restored for a couple of days – because, for example, engineers are not scheduled to start on the faults in their area until then – they have the freedom to decide to contact relatives or friends or the care services to ask for accommodation for the duration.
If all they get – which is all they did get, was ‘We’re trying our best. It’s very difficult. The next update will be at 8.00am.. 12.00 noon.. 3.00pm.. 7.00pm… they are seduced into hoping that their power may be restored within a short time. Of course they hang on and don’t make the arrangements to move out that would be better and safer for them.
And business folk have made the points in the comments above that we made – of the impact on operational decisions of the total lack of area-specific situation updates.
And we are not about to let go of our pursuit of this issue. To behave with corporate social responsibility in these situations costs no more in time and money than to abandon such responsibilities as completely as Scottish Hydro’s management did on this prolonged occasion.
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Newsroom
Thank you for your further response. You claim that I said that “communications from the field are impossible”. No, Newsroom, I didn’t. I said “the engineers on the spot were unable to keep in regular communication either with the people at the generating/switching stations, which is necessary so that repairs can be tested, or to pass on information to the call centre.” I don’t see the word “impossible” there, but I do see the actual situation represented which was that communications from field to centre were not straightforward, from which it follows that communications from centre to those providing information to the public calling in would also inevitably be poor. It is that aspect of your initial diatribe against SSE that I took exception to, because it didn’t acknowledge, and you still haven’t, that no-one can put out information that they haven’t been provided with, and there were very good reasons, which you failed to take into account, why the information couldn’t be provided to callers.
My relative who was told of the 10 faults in 10 miles has later said that, as another correspondent has mentioned, the finding and repairing of one fault – many of them cables coming off insulators, or insulators coming off poles – would uncover another previously unknown fault. Yesterday, 3 days after the storm, he tells me that there was a helicopter flying low along the power lines in his area looking for further faults along the less accessible lines which the very stretched engineers had yet to get to.
It would of course be great to have a storm-proof system, but undergrounding throughout Argyll is completely impracticable on cost grounds, while other measures, judging by what happened where I live, would be to fell all trees anywhere near cables, as well as to compulsorily demolish any sheds or farm buildings within hundreds of yards of any overhead line – a complete garden shed and corrugated iron sheets from a farm building were both responsible for breaking cables near here, the shed having travelled at least 200 yards!
I would just add that I agree completely with Webcraft’s latest comment (7th Jan, 1.08 pm) on your claim that we have a “right to information”. Perhaps you could give chapter and verse for this.
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Well said Alex McKay.
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Newsroom,
I am sure that the communications facilities of the Hydro Board were at full stretch communicating with the repair teams, the emergency services, social services etc.
To expect them to keep a large enough dedicated PR team manning the switchboards 24 hours a day just to have enough comms capacity in reserve to keep the public informed when all hell is breaking loose is unreasonable and would in (normal) times of non-crisis no doubt provoke criticism of waste and featherbedding, with fingers pointed accusingly at the figure at the bottom of our electricity bill
.
Sorry, much as it pains me to agree with some of your regular detractors, on this one I think you are bang out of order.
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Newsroom having a wee silly spell methinks!
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Were you affected by the power cuts, phill?
If you saw the three days worth of emails we are now working our way through – and learned what we have learned about the consequences of this information failure at the sharp end, none of this would seem at all ‘silly’.
Where the storm was unavoidable, the information failure was wholly avoidable – and it compounded the stress and the distress for those affected.
While some have the money, the time and the freedom to organise for all eventualities, most have not. Life does not accord equal chances to all.
Scottish Hydro let everyone down in its information handling in this emergency and the vast majority felt that let-down sharply.
We would not expect those unaffected themselves or those without the information at our disposal to understand fully what the consequences of this failure actually were – but a little imagination is not all that hard to find, surely?
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Yes and only have praise for the men on the ground and at the office. An overhead line had come down. Only ‘off’ overnight and not as bad as some but would not look for scapegoats and accept that we done live in an ideal world, but then sometimes i look around at our area and think its as ideal as possible. Count you blessings.
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While some have the money, the time and the freedom to organise for all eventualities, most have not. Life does not accord equal chances to all.
As I said before, I think you will find that the Hydro Board were busy communicating wiith the less fortunate and those who serve them.
How many phone conversations do you think there were with the police, with ambulances, with hospitals, with repair crews?
And how much spare capacity do you think that left for talking to you about the fact that you didn’t have any wi-fi?
To compare it with the information centre at an airport when flights are cancelled shows no real understnading of the issues involved.
You have had a lot of intelligent and normally supportive posters telling you that you are wrong about this. Perhaps it is time to review your position, which is frankly indefensible.
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So tell us Oh Wise One from the West – given your critical comments about the engineers and the speed of repairs and since you’ve got an opinion on everything else – how many repairs do you think the engineers should be carrying out per hour ?
And what, if anything, is the basis of your estimate
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We must have been the lucky ones in Islay as a phone call to Hydro HQ at 11am told us the power should be restored by 3pm and to their credit it arrived at 3.20pm. Some parts are still off but a fair squad of engineers are here today working on it. Would some of those complaining go out to work in those conditions?
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Newsroom: I understand what you are saying, and why. Still, we have to remember what our Hydro has been through for 9 long, long months (as have we all) Yes, English-owned, perhaps: every time I have phoned before the latest onslaughts, I have met soft-spoken and sympathetic Scots at the other end of the phone. Same Scots have always phoned back to let us know what was happening and to check that we were okay. In the past 2 months, they – like all of us – have been overwhelmed by the constant, non-stop barrage. I salute their efforts, then, whether by the front-line people or those in the background trying to cope with the volume of calls. None of us can cope really well with what the last 9 months have landed on us. I’m just still so grateful that the folk we need – power, water – still keep going.
Let’s just say “thank-you” and hope for better
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Don’t usually find myself in disagreement, Newsroom. I’ve been in the position to see and speak to the men on the ground over the last three days. There is no way they could have foreseen the chaos that confronted them in this highly unusual weather. For the first hours they had no way of communicating with the suppliers and their bosses except when they found a house with an old plug-in phone. They got connected enough eventually for their own communication system to work and repeatedly came upon unexpected complications. Our small community looked after each other while disconnected. We live in the natural world and it is perhaps even a refreshing reminder for us to consider how depend we are making ourselves and how unable to live in our own natural world.
These men have eyes red-rimmed with lack of sleep having done 20 hour shifts then returning after a long drive to digs where no hot meal has been available. They don’t even have access to toilet facilities in the course of carrying out their duties. When I thanked the Welshman working on our community’s problems, he brushed it aside saying he was only doing his job and if it hadn’t been him it would have been someone else. He had no idea where he was heading next, or when he would get home (after an eight hour drive). Whoever you’re getting at, please make it abundantly clear in your original article that it is not these men who have been doing their jobs in the most horrendous and frustrating conditions. Why should people not be thanked for doing their jobs? Thank goodness they do.
I’m glad it was only three days, and – hey! – the world continues to revolve on its axis.
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For Jeepers Creepers: To be clear – and the article was clear – we made no reference to the engineers on the ground only to the utterly incompetent information service in the emergency – and to the management of information gathering. This is part of the overall service to customers. No one can reliably predict the absolute strength of storm winds, or control them, or predict what specific damage they will do. And no one can repair the damage faster than it takes. But people can be given situation updates relayed from field engineers.
It is astonishing that a plug in phone is not an automatic part of the kit of engineers in the field – for the sake both of their own need to communicate and of getting their situation assessments through to a source that can pass them on to the public.
This is not time consuming. It is about no more that the adoption of simple systems. This means as little as an engineer on a job adding a sentence to every phone call – to be passed on from the other end to information updates. This need be no more than saying: ‘Listen, mate – there’s no way we’re getting this done before tomorrow lunchtime. Say two o’clock to be on the safe side.’ OR: ‘If you can get this kit out to us within a couple of hours, we’ll be able to wrap this one up in about another two.’ Engineers will be saying stuff like this to whoever they’re talking to anyway – and they are the ones who do know what they have to get done and how long, roughly, it may take. That’s all we’re talking about.
People know they’ll get power back when they get it – and that this will be as soon as humanly possible – which the engineers ensure. But people have independent decisions to make to control their own lives in the midst of the emergency. They simply need the information – which exists – that allows them to make the best possible decisions in their own interests.
And no one was given remotely useful information throughout this situation – nor even information intended to be useful. What could be helpful in any way to anyone in being continually told only that everyone is working hard, that it’s all very difficult and that the next update will be in four hours time?
Our attack is strongly on the management of the information handling side of the operation – not on the engineers in any way whatsoever and not in any way on the call centre staff who were invariably courteous but knew nothing more than those who had called in. There were several occasions when we were told that they were expecting staff updates at a particular time and to ring back then. In almost all of these cases the staff updates did not come. Talking to the Perth Call Centre yesterday lunchtime (Thursday 5th January) – they had had no staff update since 3.30pm the previous day. This is the level of management systems failure we’re talking about – and it is not acceptable.
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Being privy to the press releases sent out by Hydro, I fully agree with newsie that the lack of information was appaling. Each digest was full of ‘arent we doing well’ spin…. Only in the last couple of lines did these messages offer information of any substance related to the situation in specific areas. Along with running our local Ardentinny community web site we also run a successful online business with 60% of our business coming from overseas. Had Hydro provided location specific info from the outset, we would have been much better placed to plan for the days ahead. Unfortunately Ardentinny has suffered a double whammy in all this, with half the village having no phone lines (including us) due to a tree going thru the main shore road cable. Since Tuesday we have relied on a distant Voda mast connecting via very slow and temperamental GPRS. To get a useable 3G signal, my car has become a mobile office to keep our business running. Why oh why do the mobile operators not have in place generators to power these rural masts and upgrade all masts to 3G? We are very much second class citizens in the sticks it would seem.
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Well done to all those individuals who managed to prepare for the storm beforehand. It must of been nice snuggling up in front of the Aga/log fire as the storm blew over. Please forgive us who weren’t so wise and well prepared.
Could I please ask one of you to write a letter to my landlord telling him that he needs to build a chimney and fireplace, with accompanying log fire, for me to ensure I am better prepared for the next outage.
Oh, as your writing that letter could you also write a letter for the elderly neighbour I visited requesting the same.
She has very bad arthiritis and is actually unable to use a match or lighter to even light a candle but I will remember to tell her she needs to be better prepared next time.
I also know a young couple who are living in new purpose built social housing, where their contract state’s they aren’t allowed to use portable gas appliances. Unfortunately he has just lost his job and they have a new born and two year old.
They were incredibly worried about not being able to give their oldest a hot meal but their biggest concern was not being able to heat the baby’s bottle as she wouldn’t drink it when it was very cold.
Because he’s recently become unemployed and she only has a part time job, on the minimum wage, they actually find it difficult to survive on a day-to-day basis, but I will certainly make sure to tell them that they need to be better prepared next time. After all, it is the year 2012.
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There will still be gales in 2050. The next one of this magnitude is not due ’til 2055ish.
The road at Tayvallich in 1968 (also January) had fishing boats washed up on it. The latest storm was the only one since then to produce such high water that this would be possible. Luckily, all moorings held this time. (There’s a picture of the three long-keeled boats on the shore, that can now be seen in the Inn.)
The big difference is that there were not so many fatalities this time. Chimneys came down in Glasgow last time and killed quite a few people. As far as I know everyone survived this one.
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Robert Mac, I sympathise. A kind friend lent me a calor gas heater and camping stove so I was able to have a modicum of comfort. As I said, I’m very glad it was only 3 days and I wasn’t too socially unacceptable! Maybe you could consider for future events – I think I’ll consider investing myself. In the meantime, Argyll residents should maybe unite to ensure that a more sensible approach is taken in social housing – allowing stoves/chimneys. Not sure how private landlords could have pressure applied. But let’s not gripe at those who have had the means to cope – rather use them as a model to persuade policy changes.
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Thank you for your sentiments but I fear you miss the point.
It isn’t about about griping about those who have the means. It’s about griping about those who have the means and assume everyone else is in the same position. They aren’t!
I find them to be self assuming, ignorant fools, who simply appear, in this thread at least, to be using any opportunity to promote their own agendas, which has nothing to do with the subject matter.
We pay a higher tariff/premium for our utilites, therefore why shouldn’t we expect at least the same level of service as they get in urban areas. If this had happened in any of the cities, there would of been uproar, it was hardly covered by the BBC on the 2nd day.
People appear to be so happy and willing to plan for decline, why? Why should we accept a lesser service just because we are living in a rural setting. Why should we pay a higher premium but be happy to accept a lower level of service.
On the engineers, yes of course they should be applauded, unquestionably. But remember, this industry is governed rigorously by Health & Safety, quite rightly so, and they would never allow their personnel to take unnecessary risks under any circumstances.
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I didn’t miss your point at all. I’m sorry you’re so bitter about people who are prepared. And they are not, at least in this area, all the great and the monied. My generous friend was not in the slightest self-assuming and ignorant – that’s why I benefitted.
I’m prepared to plan for the weather, which doesn’t equal decline. We shouldn’t believe that our society can tame nature. Can you imagine the mess we’d make of it – can you not see the mess we are making of it?
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Jeepers Creepers – I apologise, it appeared as if I was having a go at yourself, that wasn’t my intent.
TBH we had a really good time with the kids, we just turned it into a big adventure, telling them how lucky they were that the ice wasn’t forming on the inside of the window as it did when I was a kid. They loved telling me how old I was.
I am certainly not bitter about those people who have the means to be prepared, I thought I had made that clear in my last post. If I am honest I would fall into the category who could afford to be prepared but maybe you assumed otherwise because I said we were renting!
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To Robert Mac:
We pay a higher tariff/premium for our utilites, therefore why shouldn’t we expect at least the same level of service as they get in urban areas.
Oh do grow up – or move to an urban area. As I said before, I think you will find that the Hydro Board were busy communicating wiith the less fortunate and those who serve them. How many phone conversations do you think there were with the police, with ambulances, with hospitals, with repair crews?
And how much spare capacity do you think that left for talking to you about your minor inconveniences?
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Webcraft – I haven’t a scooby what your talking about. Where have I mentioned the Hydro board? When did I mention anything about communications? I haven’t a clue about any phone conversations with the police, ambulances or any other services, it hadn’t even crossed my mind, why don’t you tell us!
I haven’t a clue how much spare capacity they have to talk to me, I didn’t phone them.
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Where have I mentioned the Hydro board?
Eh? They are the utility company responsible for your electricity supply, with which you are apparently profoundly disatisfied.
If it is not communication (Newsroom’s beef) then in what way are you unhappy with the service provided during/after the recent storms?
If you want city level services then move to the city, because it is never going to be economical to provide that level of service in rural areas of Argyll. Your apparent inability to understand why lines came down and why it took some time to repair them shows that you have no understanding of the environment you live in.
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Pingback: » Power being restored days after storms hit Scotland – BBC News » Energized Energized
Engineers did a great job. Much respect. Management stuffed it. Not over the last three days, but over the last tens years. Talk to the bodies on the ground now. Dividends paid out to shareholders, rather than profits reinvested at the necessary level into the network. Customers are paying now for years of neglect. All those trees should never have been so close to the lines nor so big …
And sure this was a big storm, but given the climate is become more chaotic, surely the Hydro should be hardening the network to this sort of calamity? Surely? No excuse. Newsroom’s on the right track here. Fire a rocket up the management’s arses and get them to start looking at ensuring we have security of supply to every household.
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nonchuk: “Engineers did a great job. Much respect. Management stuffed it. Not over the last three days, but over the last tens years. Talk to the bodies on the ground now. Dividends paid out to shareholders, rather than profits reinvested at the necessary level into the network. Customers are paying now for years of neglect.”
I’ve had these shares for a good few years and whilst the divvy’s been OK, whenever I’ve peeped into a few stations off the beaten track I’ve seen lots of the Bruce Peebles, Babcox etc gear replaced with modern stuff. No right to be denying us bigger divvy’s, eh? And, as for painting Faskally …
At the next AGM I’ll raise the matter and tell the board to stop wasting their money on this load of whingers …
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To nonchuk:
And sure this was a big storm, but given the climate is become more chaotic, surely the Hydro should be hardening the network to this sort of calamity?
Tell that to the climate denial lobby who control the media. And how exactly are you going to ‘harden’ the network for less than many billion pounds?
Perhaps you should join Robert Mac and Newsroom and move to the city – you don’t seem to be cut out for life in the country.And while you are at it, check the dictionary for the meaning of ‘calamity’ – because this wasn’t one.
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Simple way to harden the network is to bury every new line and old ones every time the poles need replacing (which is quite often around Barcaldine because of the woodpeckers). Yes it costs money but how much money does it cost having teams of engineers working around the clock to fix lines? Underground lines are not only more robust when it comes to falling trees but also against lightening strikes and power induction.
Billions? Possibly yes for the whole grid in Scotland but then again we seem to manage it for bank bailouts – not to mention bankers bonuses – nuclear weapons, wars in far off lands,new train line that don’t come to Scotland….. it is all just a question of priorities.
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You should have a word with your chums in the SNP about the Beauly to Denny power line , as you say “it is all a question of priorities”
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Kintyre1: actually this is one where I fundamentally disagree with both the current SNP government and my good friend Jim Mather. I feel the correct decision would have been to underground larger sections of the line (and I am in good company on that).
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Irrespective of the good sentiments expressed Dr D, it aint gonna happen, so back in the real world what would you do, and who would pay. We need to be realistic and i am with webcraft on this. Its part and parcel of life in this part of the world and generally accepted as such by most (repeat most) several generation families.(but obviously not all)
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I think you are missing the point Phill: at some point it becomes cheaper to underground than overground. At that point it is a no-brainer.
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….And in another real world -the Netherlands- all low to medium power cables are undergrounded. They seem to manage it without the sky falling in on them.
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Totally differnet terrain sir.
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Webcraft – So you are of the opinion that because we live in a rural setting we should happily accept higher tariffs for utilities accompanied by a lower level of service?
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Webcraft – So you are of the opinion that because we live in a rural setting we should happily accept higher tariffs for utilities accompanied by a lower level of service?
Yes. It is simple economics. The benefits IMO still outweigh the disadvantages, but you obviously can’t see that. If your equation is balanced the other way then you can always move back to the city.
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Webcraft – What is it that I can’t see?
What I can see is the increasing basic costs of living being heaped disproportionately on rural Argyll. What I do see is an alarming increase in young families moving to the city simply because they can’t afford to live here anymore. What I do see is the increasing costs of utilities and living negatively affecting local businesses in Argyll.
What I don’t see about your approach is how will it attract families to live in Argyll. How will it attract new businesses and industries if all we can offer them is higher costs and a lower level of service and so on.
Is this also your view of how Argyll should expect to be treated in an independent Scotland, paying more to recieve less?
By the way, don’t take up the tarot cards, your clairvoyant skills are rubbish, but please tell me, which city should I return too?
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To Robert Mac,
It will always cost more to live in the countryside if you expect the same level of facilities you get in a city. The simple economics of scale and distribution guarantee that, and also ensure that some facilities will simply never be economic to install. So – no dual carriageway from Seil to Oban for me, and probably no fibre optic 20GB broadband either.
(And no streetlights – please, no streetlights, or traffic lights on the bridge – though I know there are those who want them).
There are measures that can be taken – in Norway for example the rate of income tax used to be inversely proportional to the distance from Oslo. The central Norwegian government has also invested heavily in rural infrastructure such as roads, railways and tunnels. It is to be hoped that once the Scottish government gets its hands on the money it will be able to pursue similiarly enlightened policies. That however is still in the future, and if you want it to happen then you know what you have to do . . .
But even in a rosy independent future you are likely to find that life in the country will feature fewer of the ‘perks’ of civilisation than life in a bigger community. No amount of social engineering or redistribution of wealth can ever remedy this, nor should it. Those of us who have chosen to live and work in rural areas for most of our lives have done so because we enjoy many less-tangible benefits which the ‘townie’ can only ever be vicariously aware of.
Saying that you should expect to live in rural Argyll and enjoy all the benefits of city life at the same price is having your cake, eating it and then expecting the council to come round on a daily basis to hoover up your crumbs. Let’s have a little realism in this debate.
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Webcraft – When did I say we should have all the benefits at the same price?
I am challenging your assertion that we should happily pay higher prices AND accept a lower level of service.
When I go to the local petrol station I expect to pay a higher price for my fuel than they do in the city. I don’t expect it to be an inferior quality of fuel.
When I go into the Spar I expect to pay slightly higher for a pint of milk, I don’t expect it to be watered down.
Are you seriously suggesting that just because we live in Argyll it is okay for utility services to treat us as simple country bumpkins? Do we not deserve a bit more than that.
And there you go again talking about ‘townies’, what city was I to go back too? For your information I was born and brought up in Argyll and I have also spent most of my life in Argyll. I did indeed live in a city about twenty years ago for roughly five months, does that now make me a ‘townie’? Were you born and brought up in Argyll?
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Robert,
Rural electricity is generally every bit as good as town electricity. It is however always going to be more vulnerable to weather.
There is a mechanism in place for people to get compensation for major outages. The amounts offered represent a substantial saving on your annual bill, therefore you ARE getting your electricity for less if you take advantage of this.
Of course, I don’t know how much joy people are having in claiming these sums. We have applied for £75 for the 48 hour outage we suffered during Hurricane Bawbag and have been advised that it will be processed in due course, but there is (understandably) a backlog. If/when we get it this will represent approximately a 7% discount on our annual bill.
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Billions? Possibly yes for the whole grid in Scotland but then again we seem to manage it for bank bailouts – not to mention bankers bonuses – nuclear weapons, wars in far off lands,new train line that don’t come to Scotland….. it is all just a question of priorities.
It is not a question of priorities, it is a question of economics. The cost of undergrounding all the power lines in Argyll would bankrupt the country, let alone the county. Who is going to pay for that? (It’s a privatised industry, remember).
I’m disappointed Dr McKenzie – I thought you lived in the real world. Face it, we are going to have a few periods without power in the average Winter. We always have and I suspect we always will.
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Webcraft: billions over time (and probably in the low billions). So, in perspective, maybe two to three Edinburgh tram schemes or less than one year’s City of London bonuses.
Remember that line upgrades/renewals and new lines are put in all the time. Many of these are already put underground so we are talking about the additional cost of undergrounding all lines as maintenance is done – so much cheaper than saying that we are just going to embark on a programme of undergrounding the whole grid from scratch.
If climatologists are correct about climate change then Scotland is due to become wetter and windier (oh joy). Storms will become more frequent and overhead lines will come down more often. This leads to more emergency repairs which are expensive. You are quite correct in saying it is all a matter of economics – at some point the additional cost of undergrounding is matched by savings on repairs and maintenance.
I most certainly live in the real world but I recognise that the one we currently inhabit is not the only possible (or practical) one.
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Newsroom,
On this one I think you are quite right.
All credit to the staff who answered the phones and returned calls with update information and of course especially for the engineers who did a great job in terrible conditions and the managers who co-ordinated them in what must have been a logistics nightmare.
For the many commentators who think you have over-reacted I can only assume that they are hail and hearty sorts who also have the wherewithal to have duel fuel and backup systems. For those however who are frail, disabled or otherwise vulnerable, information would have particularly valuable, as indeed it would have been to carers, community nursing staff and others, to allow them to plan and allocate resources to alleviate the situation and reduce risk. Your point about ripple mattresses, mobility aids etc is well made and of course for those who were vulnerable who only had mobile or DECT phones calling for help and assistance or responding to enquiries about how they were coping would have been impossible. For many who live at home the challenges of everyday living are difficult enough, it can be made impossible without heat, light or communications. The services and good neighbours that we would expect to support them during this time could have done so all the better and more effectively if they had the information necessary to plan and prioritise their response and some, albeit imperfect, prediction as to whether power would be restored in 3 hours or 3 days.
I’m not critising Hydo for what they did actually achieve, they did a great job getting power quickly back to the many. However, there is room for improvement in their communications with the public and other agencies which they need to see as a crucial and vital component of their response to a power outage of this scale rather than a PR tactic of least said soonest mended.
For those commentators that coped well I’m glad, but rather than trumpet their stoicism and resilience in the face of adversity they should consider those who didn’t and couldn’t.
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Resilience’ adversity’ stoicism’. wow! —as you say Jake it was a logistics nightmare and well handled and will be looked at to update/improve future contingencies, BUT no magic wand eh?
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I wonder where the community councils were in all this. Were they pro-active in your community during the crisis? Did they have emergency plans in place for checking on vulnerable people and actioning or was it left to neighbors and the council.? It really is not rocket science to have a pre-arranged plan for these types of situations taking into account the possible lack of phone coverage, electricity or other utilities. Over the years cc’S have taken a hammering in the media for being totally out of touch with their communities. This past week could have been their saviour!
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Dr. Mackenzie,
Have you been to Holland? The distances, topography and geology make undergrounding cables a lot easier than digging trenches across the Argyll hills.
Exactly how big an increase would you be prepared to put up with on your electricity bill in return for the undergrounding of all the power lines in Argyll?
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Webcraft: never seen you as a nay sayer before!
Yes I have been to Holland (many times). Yes it is different from here (more prone to flooding for starters). But what has that to do with the question? – which to remind people was how can the grid be made more robust in the face of storms such as we have recently been experiencing.
The answer is undergrounding; I don’t think there is any doubt that undergrounding is the best way to increase the resilience of the distribution grid in the face of storm activity. That is the technical solution.
Your answer to this technical solution is that undergrounding is too expensive (but you haven’t produced any data to back this up). Undergrounding is certainly more expensive in terms of installation costs. For rural areas it is between 2 and 4 times more expensive than overgrounding. For urban areas it is 10x more expensive (on average) but in urban areas undergrounding is standard practise and the electricity companies are allowed to recoup the costs from the customers. So we are all already paying “extra” on our electricity supply costs because of the additional cost of urban undergrounding.
Undergrounding has a number of additional advantages over overground distribution other than simple increase in network resilience. Maintenance is cheaper; the network is much safer (no more anglers, kite flyers, loggers or the plain daft electrocuted every year); the environment is enhanced through the reduction in overhead wires; underground cables are much more resistant to theft (an increasing problem).
These additional advantages have cost benefits: some tangible (such as maintenance) some less tangible (environmental impact). When these are offset against the increased installation costs there are times where undergrounding already makes economic sense and will become increasingly so as maintenance costs for overhead distribution systems rise to increasingly inclement weather (presuming the climate predictions are correct).
As I made clear earlier, I’m not suggesting we embark on a huge programme of undergrounding the distribution network: rather I’m suggesting that when upgrades, replacements or new lines are planned then they should be undergrounded as a matter of policy. This means that the increased capital costs are spread over time (probably decades)and should not have a major impact on electricity costs (and nothing in comparison to the rise due to wholesale energy costs). As the Chinese say, the longest journey starts with a single step.
At the end of the process we end up with a distribution network that is more resilient, safer and environmentally attractive. I’m sure there are areas in Scotland where undergrounding will never be possible (or at least not remotely cost effective) but I would like to see some figures on that before being overly pessimistic.
I would also point out that all the other utilities use underground distribution systems: water and gas pretty much exclusively and telecoms increasingly.
Of course, another solution is to move to off-grid systems so that houses or at least communities in rural areas supply their own electrical power. This would be a highly resilient system but more expensive given current technological restraints.
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As I made clear earlier, I’m not suggesting we embark on a huge programme of undergrounding the distribution network: rather I’m suggesting that when upgrades, replacements or new lines are planned then they should be undergrounded as a matter of policy. This means that the increased capital costs are spread over time (probably decades)and should not have a major impact on electricity costs (and nothing in comparison to the rise due to wholesale energy costs). As the Chinese say, the longest journey starts with a single step.
If this is practical and affordable then of course it makes huge sense. However, I would prefer to hear some comments and costings from engineers in the relevant disciplines before I believe it is. The prolonged and continuing resistance by SSE and SPR to undergrounding even a small section of the Beauly-Denny line suggests that you are going to have a job persuading the electricity companies round to your point of view, and of course the public aren’t in the mood for any more subsidies for power companies.
There is certainly a lack of joined up thinking when it comes to underground services. We have had Seil dug up twice in the last four years, once to put in the new water main and once to put in the new sewage. I don’t believe anyone thought to sling some fibre optic down the hole while they were at it.
It’s called privatisation . . .
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Don’t confuse the cost of undergrounding UHV transmission systems (such as the Beauly to Denny line) versus the cost of undergrounding the low to medium voltage distribution systems. The case for undergrounding the B2D line was largely on justified environmental concerns over the impact of such large pylons in areas of outstanding natural beauty. Such large pylons should be pretty much immune to anything nature can throw at them (or at least I hope they are engineered to those standards) so the resilience case is different. I would also be interested in seeing anyone stealing the cable from a UHV line. Undergrounding UHV transmission cables is a much higher cost option than is the case for distribution networks.
I think you put your finger on the problem: privatised utilities are reluctant to invest in infrastructure as it gives poor short term returns. The lighter the regulation, the worse private utilities are at delivering stable infrastructure (talk to any Californian to see the truth of that). Publicly owned utilities are the best way of ensuring that infrastructure is properly resourced but I cannot see any early return to that.
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Publicly owned utilities are the best way of ensuring that infrastructure is properly resourced but I cannot see any early return to that.
Time for a few ‘social enterprises’ perhaps.
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@ webcraft who says;
“There is certainly a lack of joined up thinking when it comes to underground services. We have had Seil dug up twice in the last four years, once to put in the new water main and once to put in the new sewage. I don’t believe anyone thought to sling some fibre optic down the hole while they were at it.
It’s called privatisation . . .”
I quite agree. The sooner Scottish Water is privatised the better.
I have relatives on Seil and they moaned for two years about the total mess Scottish Water and their contractors were making when digging up the water mains, then the sewage.
If the water and sewage on Seil were owned by private companies with a profit motive then they would have had a commercial reason to add in fibre-optic.
Well said Webcraft!
So long as a public company owns our water and sewage networks then the more stupidity that Webcraft complains about we’ll get.
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David,
I wonder where the community councils were in all this. Were they pro-active in your community during the crisis?
Well, it would be delightful to think so, but I doubt it.
Perhaps Newsroom can conduct a survey across the community councils in the area to ascertain what their plans/actions are/were in their communities in the event of extreme weather, power outages and other minor disasters.
It would be heartwarming to read an article full of stories of community council led initiatives, but I suspect that most of them will do no more than pass a motion at the next meeting recommending that someone write a strongly worded letter to someone else.
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For Webcraft: We have heard of a lot of individual efforts where folk with generators rounded up vulnerable folk in their localities, brought them in and cooked meals for them. We have also heard that Argyll and Bute Council’s care was patchy, with, for example, a lot of effort made in Dunoon (the ward of the Council Leade but not a greatly affected area) against very little in Mid Argyl, which was badly hit. There was a Council soup kitchen in Lochgilphead, most of which had power almost throughout the emergency, with an area affected near the hospital (which has its own generators of course). We are also aware of activity in some community councils now. Given that a more serious role for community councils is relatively new, we suppose it is probably to be expected that realisation of thier posiiton will, as now, be retrospective, But something does seem to be stirring and we will do what we can to encourage it. You are quite right that the best and most knowledgeable assistance is the most local.
By the way, in a previous post you seemed to think that newsroom staff obviously long for or would be best suited to city life. You could not be farther from the truth. It should be obvious from what we do that we are totally committed to Argyll and to doing what we can to help to improve conditions and sustainability. None of our entire team is anything other than positive about all aspects of life in rural and often remote places.
Insisting, as we are, on an information service from major utility companies that is fit for purpose and responsive to emergencies of the scale we have just had is not the action of wimps.
It is insisting on the importance of and the right to information. What’s wrong with that?
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It is insisting on the importance of and the right to information. What’s wrong with that?
The number of calls the Hydro board receive with a quarter of the county off supply would require how many extra staff? What exactly would these people do the rest of the year, and how much would it put our electricity bills up by?
In any event, what information would they have been able to give you?
ring ring
‘Hello, it’s Mrs Campbell fae Auchterflibble. Can you tell me when we micht get our power back on’
‘Well, Tam Mackenzie and his team are at grid reference xx.xx.xx yy.yy.yy and think the problem might be a mark 6 widget switch, in which case they probably have one in the land rover. If it is the flibberty circuit though we don’t yet know where we are going to get a swintle relay as we used it at grid reference qq.qq.qq zz.zz.zz. In any event, they can’t go up the pole until the wind speed drops below 75 knots.’
‘So when will I be able to mak a cuppie tea?’
‘Well, we are hoping to get the power on in your area some time before midday tomorrow’
‘Can ye nae be mair specific?’
‘Sorry Mrs C, but with so many lines down and not knowing the exact position or nature of some of the faults we really can’t be more specific than that’
‘Och weel, thank you anyway’
‘You have a nice day Mrs C’
click . . .
Over and over and over again . . . I mean, really, what is the point? How is that better than a recorded message saying no news yet call back later?
As soon as the pressure was relaxed a little you were able speak to a person again, but when the chips are down surely you want 100% of the company’s resources devoted to getting things fixed? I certainly don’t want to pay for dozens of unnecessary call centre staff who will only actually be working a few nights a year and whose ‘information’ will be of no practical help.
Perhaps you can quote the legislation that gives us a ‘right to information‘?
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Webcraft – you’re not really expecting an answer to your reasonable question are you? ‘Cause if you are then you won’t get it. You must understand by now that Newsie makes and continues to make sweeping fatuous statements and when called ot account – simply ignores the question.
As an example I posted this yesterday in response to Newsie’s critical comments about the engineers (despite Newsie’s oft repeated claim that the engineers were never criticised in the article…)
I wrote [Newsie] “given your critical comments about the engineers and the speed of repairs and since you’ve got an opinion on everything else – how many repairs do you think the engineers should be carrying out per hour ?
And what, if anything, is the basis of your estimate?”.
Still waiting for an answer……
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For Simon: You have to understand that we have a job to do which is little less than 24/7 and do not have the luxury of time simply to watch for, read and respond to all comments. We respond as best we can and when we can – and not all of us even see all comments.
Be assured that we never run away from an argument because our first position is always a reasoned one. That has never meant that we do not pay attention as best we can to what readers have to say; and any fair observer would have noted that we are quick to recognise when we find superior wisdom.
On your current sally, it could not be more clear in what we said that we were not engaging at all with what engineers were doing on the ground but with the bland and uninformative claims made by Scottish Hydro.
If you claim you have 400 engineers on the job, note a total of 90 faults in the areas affected, seven hours later report faults down to 83 from 90 on the basis of this manpower and give no information whatsoever on the nature and location of the fault, the deployments or the specific affected areas, scrutiny is inevitable.
Customer need and are entitled to gauge whether their crucial circumstances are in the charge of an operational management that is more competent than was its dangerously inept communications management counterpart. Until such information is made publicly avaiiable on these operational matters, the jury is out. No jury would absolve the communications performance.
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Webcraft – thank you for the information on how to get a refund. Of course we can expect the ‘hydro’ to telephone all there vulnerable customers to advise them the same. Then again, surely if they have a list of vulnerable customers they should be able to give them an automatic refund, shouldn’t they? Do you think they will?
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I thought this might have some bearing on all this rantng abut the ‘vulnerable’:
From the Hydro Board’s Customer Charter:
Our Careline offers a specialised service for our vulnerable customers. You can register for Careline if you or any member of your household are:
> Over 60.
> Partially sighted or blind.
> Disabled.
> Deaf or have hearing problems.
> Chronically sick.
> Reliant on medical equipment which uses electricity.
Our Careline commitments:
> We will provide a free phone number, with no automated menus, answered by Careline specialists.
(There are others, but this seemed to be the most relevant to the current discussion).
Sadly internet bloggers are not included among the ‘vulnerable’ – though no doubt Newsroom feels they should be.
Let’s hear some stories of how genuinely vulnerable people were treated shabbily, rather than a load of blustering outrage from mildly inconvenienced able-bodied citizens. Then perhaps I could work up some enthusiasm for this non-story.
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Robert,
Agree it would be nice if the Hydro gave automatic refunds. You do seem to be confusing them with the social work department though. Advising ‘vulnerable’ customers of available help is surely part of their remit, not the Hydro Board’s.
The Hydro Board will also deliver generators to vulnerable hosueholds where an outage is expected to last a certain time (think it is 24+ hours but not sure on this one). All professional carers should be aware of this.
The utility companies should be the first candidates for conversion to the ‘social enterprises’ that were mentioned in another thread, but until then they are primarily responsible to their shareholders and can it would be realistic to expect them to behave as such.
In the meantime, ForArgyll could be giving out information about what help is available instead of delivering bombastic broadsides that help no-one.
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Your post 17 above – “One thing I don’t think helps much is ranting abut the information provided by the hydro board. Their communication priorities are organising repairs, assisting the emergency services and ensuring provision for the sick and elderly”
Make up your mind!
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See my post above re. the Hydro Board’s Customer Charter and its Careline service.
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We were without electricity for over 53 hours from 6.30am on Tuesday 3rd January 2012 until 11.50am on Thursday 5th January 2012. During this period we received NO communication from either our local councillor(s) or community councillors asking if we needed help. As this was the fourth storm to hit our region this winter I would have thought that Argyll & Bute Council would have had a contingency plan in place.
If there is bad weather in the Perth area due to snow, gales or flooding the North Inch Community Campus is available to help residents and/or motorists in their “hour of need”. Hot meals, warmth and beding is available should people need help including staying overnight.
Where we live in Argyll & Bute there is nothing and residents are left to fend for themselves.
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Webcraft.
If SSE stopped wasting money on erecting wind farms and spent the money on putting electricity cables underground it would save them in the long run. The proposed Beauly to Denny power line should be scrapped with inmmediate effect and the savings from that expense could also be used to offset the cost of putting electricity cables underground.
The main BT telephone cables are also underground. It is now quite easy to put cables underground using a mole type machine. My former golf club in Dundee put in a pop-up sprinkler system using this method and you would never know where the cables lay by looking at the fairways. There is no need to dig trenches.
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Treblet
It is indeed very easy to put telephone lines and water pipes underground using a mole type machine, but it would not be possible to do the same with 2 or 3 phase electricity cables, that definitely require the digging of a much larger and deeper trench. That is why, apart from the much greater cost of the cables compared with those strung from poles, undergrounding is so expensive. You clearly don’t care for wind farms, but SSE wouldn’t be erecting them if they didn’t make money. And SSE aren’t likely to underground long stretches of cable as the cost of doing so far outweighs the occasional (even rare) storm damage events such as Argyll has just suffered.
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@webcraft
Seems that I was the only one to support your call for the privatisation of Scottish Water..Viz:
“There is certainly a lack of joined up thinking when it comes to underground services. We have had Seil dug up twice in the last four years, once to put in the new water main and once to put in the new sewage. I don’t believe anyone thought to sling some fibre optic down the hole while they were at it.
It’s called privatisation . . .” (webcraft)
or meybe I misinterpreted your words and, in fact, you don’t realise that Scottish Water is actually a public company. You’re not a troll perhaps who has been betrayed by his/her lack of local/Scottish knowledge ?
If so: away and boil your head old chap.
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erm . . .
I think you will find that while Scottish Water may still be publicly owned BT (the fibre/internet people) are privately owned, ‘old chap’.
You definitely misunderstood my words – probably deliberately. I want to see BT and the electricity generators taken back into public ownership or converted to social enterprises. That is the only way we are going to get any joined up thinking.
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Undergrounding sounds wonderful, but let’s face it, it’s not going to happen. We’re not talking tunneling machines happily munching their way through soil and clay in Argyll, but climbing up and down mountains and through rock where there is no “ground”. What could be done, and something which hasn’t really been discussed, is that all trees capable of falling on lines are removed before they get a chance to interrupt our power supply; it’s called “preventive action”. That this has not been done on a planned basis from day one means there is an enormous backlog of work to be undertaken, but lets look on the bright side: it would create employment, produce lots of timber for heating when the power goes off, and Scottish Hydro et al could afford it. I could go on about privatised industry not taking preventive action because it might damage profits, but that’s another story…
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Putting the cables underground does sound like the ultimate solution, but just to let you know how costly it is…
a number of years ago, after too many powercuts to count, including one that lasted for around 3 weeks, the residents of Luss and its Community Council, enlisted the support of MPs and MSPs, forced Scottish Hydro to put the lines underground around the village.
The project took a couple of years to complete and a cost of around £4 million. This included 2 emergency generators hooked up inside the village and one outside.
So it is possible, but if it cost that for the area around Luss, that gives you a ballpark figure for other areas.
Incidentally, on Tuesday morning, we were cut off for 3 hours, but apart from that the situation has improved immensely.
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Dr M,
My company in it’s portfolio of products also provides subsea power transmission umbilical for transmission from offshore wind farms to shore. Therefore I’m all in favour of indergrounding, more work for my company, decent profit and a nice bonus!!!
But seriously it is an option, but the cost??? I don’t think a you could justify the present day capex through savings in the Opex, the numbers just wouldn’t add up
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Well – going underground might be a pipe dream – but I’ve just talked to some line engineers. Including one guy who has been up here since Boxing Day – not even opened his Christmas Presents yet. They’ve all been working 16-18 hours days (some of their mates are still up the hills tonight) and they are absolutely shattered.
One guy was Cornwall the others were from Newcastle, the Midlands and Northern Ireland.
I mentioned to them Newsie’s remarks about how few line repairs 400 engineers had completed. They were fuming – “we can’t go in until the tree surgeons clear it”, “We have to do a risk assesment first”, “there were line engineers on the helicopters spotting and calling for parts” and finally “We’ve been working flat out for days now – truth be told we don’t even know where we are working – if Tom-Tom packs up- we’re lost”.
This influx of non-Scots helping us out kinda made me think about this hasty rush to independence….
However, thanks to these guys – and they all said “sorry” (or words to that effect) – when I told them Newsie wished to be kept better informed in future…..
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One assumes you were lurking in the forest looking for a brain when meeting “the guy from Cornwall the others were from Newcastle, the Midlands and Northern Ireland.”
“This influx of non-Scots helping us out kinda made me think about this hasty rush to independence…”
Perhaps you should have thought about what you were writing as you perhaps gave the most eloquent argument in favour of independence. Does it not concern you in the slightest you are advocating a union which alienates giving local jobs to LOCAL PEOPLE.
Simon, lose the beard and cut the long hair. Get a life. And find a brain. It’s not too much to ask.
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The Rhinns area of Islay suffered several power cuts last year outwith the stormy weather due to SSE’s make do and mend (sticking plaster) approach to the electricity cables serving that area. The various power cuts lasted up to almost three hours in length. There was even a power cut of two hours on the 1st of July 2010 which is Midsummer day.
This part of Islay has few trees so they cannot be blamed for causing the power cuts. In my opinion the blame lies with SSE who have not kept the infrastructure up to date and are more interested in paying an increasing annual dividend to their shareholders. According to the SSE website the current annual dividend payment is 75p per ordinary share.
The directors of SSE should be cutting the ordinary dividend to shareholders and using these funds to ensure that the Scottish Hydro Electric infrastructure is totally up to date to meet the demands of their customers.
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Treblet
The amount of an annual dividend is meaningless without saying what the share price is – which is currently just under £13.00, so 75p is a roughly 5.7% return. SSE also have a long record of increasing the return from dividends as a way of attracting and then keeping investors. If they started cutting the dividend, the directors might well find it harder to raise the £1.5-1.7 billion pounds they plan to spend each year. Perhaps that includes upgrading your area!
Islay is of course fortunate in having its own diesel generator which insulates it (sorry about the pun!) from mainland problems. I gather that the two main villages on Islay were only without power for an hour or two on Tuesday. I bet the inhabitants of Bute wish they had their own generator after their prolonged outage this week.
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Hi Alex, you’re right to say that Bowmore and Port Ellen were without power for only a short time but lots of us elsewhere on Islay were cut off for up to 55 hours, many without water too due to the need for a pumped supply in some areas. Unfortunately our power station, while very handy if there is an isolated mainland fault, cannot operate in circumstances such as last week’s where there is damage all over the local network. To get back to the main point though, I do think newsroom has lost the plot a bit on this one. This was as bad a storm as I have ever seen and to expect hour-by-hour updates would have been truly daft. It was clear from the activity all around that as much as possible was being done to reconnect customers and Webcraft at 41 makes that point very succintly – how could we expect constant updates when engineers were working in chaotic and dangerous conditions? To criticise the speed of repairs also displays a lack of understanding of how the grid works – it’s not just sticking wires together with sellotape…..
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For Alison: Sorry you had such a bad time. All islands must feel like sitting ducks in conditions like this. Whatever the wind direction, it will get you somewhere.
One correction – where did we mention ‘hour by hour updates’ or even mention prescribed time intervals?
We were and are talking about quality of information, allowing people to manage such emergencies as best they can for their own needs and circumstances. If it’s given at five hour intervals, for example., but is the good quality and area specific information people must be given – what’s wrong with that?
As it was, thousands waited powerless for 60 – 100 hours and possibly more, without ever getting one single piece of relevant information. Everyone knew engineers were doing their best and that it was all difficult. But folk needed to know the picture for their area, however gloomy that picture might have been – because that information would have let them actively manage their circumstances for the best.
And the management who did not establish an adequate information service were a long way behind the lines of the storm, from the front line engineers who take the brunt of it. And they made the worst possible hash of it.
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Thanks Alison – fair comment from someone at the coalface.
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Just read on the BBC news website that Scottish power had deployed over 850 engineers at the peak of the repair efforts.
I take it that all authorities involved in the efforts will conduct a lessons learnt session of which an in-depth statistical analysis of the mtbf and time to restoration will be examined.
My criticism of the initial report on here was the use of the words “many” without real quantitification. I do not expect that the average demographic of argyll is significantly different to the rest of Scotland, in regards to vulnerable or elderly groups.
In short report the facts, despite your own personal circumstances leave the speculation to those publications which are best used as toilet paper.
I think we can only have a reasoned debate once the lesson learnt and subsequent reports are published.
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Ourmaninoslo: Glad to be helping your company’s profits!
As to practicality and cost: CSB’s interesting post shows both that undergrounding is the most practical solution to preventing (or at least reducing) outages caused by storm damage (my initial point) and that the utilities will responsively deploy this as a solution when pressed. My point about the capex being justified by savings in opex is based on the premise that storms will increase due to climate change. If this was already generally true then the companies would already have undergrounded the grid. The question is: do we wait until the opex caused by frequent repairs makes it economic or be a bit more proactive? (and more on that in a second). As I mentioned in an earlier post, it is important not to confuse undergrounding of low and medium voltage distribution systems and the high voltage transmission systems. The former are not prohibitively expensive to underground (anymore than it is for the other utilities) and several countries already have a programme of undergrounding. I mentioned that the Netherlands have already completely undergrounded their distribution systems and both Germany and, err, the UK have programmes to accelerate undergrounding. In the UK undergrounding is encouraged in urban areas (and funded through increases in the tariffs) and in areas of natural beauty where Lottery money can be used to support it. I think it is no coincidence that Luss is in a National Park.
So, undergrounding is already being deployed and we will see more and more of the grid being protected over time. The question is more one of whether this is being done quickly enough and that in turn is related to just how common storms such as we have recently experienced will become.
Turning to “Simon’s” comment about engineers coming from outwith Scotland. The power companies realised some years back that they could cut the overall number of engineers employed if they reached agreements to mutually support each other, recognising that storms rarely hit the whole of the UK at the same time. This process was accelerated by the internationalising of the utilities so that they lost their regional flavours. The suggestion that independence would somehow threaten this is laughable and rather desperate.
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This is now historic but adds to the record of this storm.
For Argyll is still working its way through a choked inbox, following our three days and two nights out of power.
We have just come upon the press release reproduced verbatim below, from the Scottish Government, issued at 12.41 on 3rd January, a Red Alert over six hours after tens of thousands of homes and businesses had lost power.
Press Release text.
RED WARNING FOR HIGH WINDS
Scottish Government Resilience Committee in operation to address weather situation
The Scottish Government’s Resilience Committee (SGoRR) has been in constant operation this morning to address the impact of today’s Met Office Red Warning of severe high winds across west, central and southern Scotland, and the ongoing efforts to deal with transport and power disruption across the affected areas.
A ministerial meeting of SGoRR was chaired by the First Minister this morning, also involving Transport Minister Keith Brown, and another meeting will take place at 2pm. SGoRR is staffed by officials on an ongoing basis throughout the day.
The Met Office upgraded their Amber Warnings (issued yesterday) to Red Warnings at 8.14am this morning when it became clear that the wind speeds west and west-central Scotland were higher than originally anticipated in many places.
The Red Warnings are in place until noon today, but the effects of high winds will continue to be felt late into the day and will also see strong winds affecting the north and north east (likely to be in the region of 60-70mph) well into the evening.
The extreme conditions have seen significant disruption to all modes of transport, with many roads closed by falling trees and debris and overturned vehicles. Rail services across most of Scotland south of Inverness and Aberdeen have been severely affected by debris on the tracks and overhead line damage. And many ferries and flights have been cancelled or delayed. Transport Scotland have fully activated their Multi-Agency Response Team (MART).
The SGoRR meeting, chaired by the First Minister and also involving the Transport Minister Keith Brown and representatives from the Emergency Services, Transport Providers, Sepa, the Met Office, and the Power Companies, also heard that around 60,000 electricity customers were without power at that point, but that number was likely to fluctuate through the day as the storm moved east and north and engineers were able to carry out repairs.
Speaking after the SGoRR meeting, Transport Minister Keith Brown said:
“We issued advice on Monday to travellers warning that transport conditions on Tuesday morning would be difficult across much of the country, on the basis of the Met Office Amber Warning. As we have now seen, the winds experienced in parts of Scotland this morning, particularly the Central Belt, have been much stronger than originally forecast and led the Met Office to upgrade their Amber Weather Warning to Red just after 8am.
“The Scottish Government’s SGoRR operation and Transport Scotland’s Multi-Agency Response Team are fully activated and we have been in constant contact with FirstScotrail, Network Rail, local police forces, the Met Office and our operating companies to assess the situation and provide urgent advice to the travelling public.
“Our SGoRR meeting this morning, chaired by the First Minister, heard of the major work that transport providers, power companies and the emergency services are putting in to deal with the incidents being reported across the country.
“As a result of contingency arrangements, power companies had already drafted in addition staff to deal with the impact of the high winds and they are being deployed as quickly as possible to restore power supplies once it is safe to do so. Transport operators are similarly extremely busy clearing roads and railway lines where fallen trees, other debris, fallen power lines and overturned vehicles are causing considerable disruption.
“Local police forces have also been issuing travel advice based on the conditions in their area, and in many cases this advice has been not to travel –we urge everyone to heed this important advice.”
Regarding travel advice, speaking on behalf of ACPOS, Assistant Chief Constable Allan Moffat said:
“As we all know, severe winds are affecting much of central and southern Scotland . This is expected to continue until approximately 2pm today and has resulted in temporary closure of our main bridges on the road networks to high sided and indeed at times all road traffic in the effected areas.
“The Met Office has issued a red alert which means there is potential for structural damage and risk to personal safety. As well as closing bridges a number of routes have also been affected by fallen trees.
“We advise people to avoid travelling throughout this period and do not undertake any journeys that can be postponed as there will be widespread disruption throughout the affected areas.
“I would ask the public to pay close attention to weather and road updates and act accordingly to the advice given.”
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Once again the Met Office have been caught napping when it comes to them issuing severe weather warnings. http://www.magicseaweed.com were showing a pressure chart of a severe storm throughtout Scotland as early as Thursday 29th December 2011 for the following Tuesday 3rd January 2012. On Friday 30th December 2011 the Met Office website was showing NO severe weather warnings for the following 5 days up to 3rd January 2012.
On Sunday 1st January 2012 the Met Office had a Yellow amber warning for windy conditions in England on Tuesday 3rd January and nothing in Scotland.
By Monday this had been upgraded to a Yellow amber warning for windy conditions for the following day throughout the whole of Scotland apart from the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland. They also had a red alert for snow throughout the centre of Scotland.
I sent the Met Office an email on Friday 30th December 2011 advising them that their website was advising gusts of wind on the following Tuesday 3rd January 2012 of 71mph in Tiree, 66mph in Oban, 58mph in Glasgow, Newcastle 50mph, Birmingham 48mph and even London 51mph. The final sentence of my email was; Please update your 5 day severe weather warning charts to give the public advance notice of the bad weather due to hit the UK on Tuesday 3rd January 2012.
All I received was a “bog standard” email reply from the Met Office. Surely it is time for heads to roll at the Met Office especially when members of the public are giving them help.
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Readers of ForArgyll should look at http://www.magicseaweed.com click on charts then click pressure and click on the drop down showing the list of dates back to 10th December 2011.
I suggest that you click Thursday 29th Decemver 2011 and follow the 3 hourly pressure chart for the following 180 hours (seven days and twelve hours). When you reach Tuesday 3rd January 2012 you will see the developing area of low pressure which whistled through Scotland that day. How the Met Office cannot forecast it correctly when magicseaweed.com can do it six days in advance is unbelieveable.
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Alex Mckay.
Goodness knows where you get your information from but it is certainly from a very unreliable source.
Port Ellen was without power for several hours and Bowmore had no power for about 8 hours. We were without power for 53 hours. The residents of Port Wemyss and Portnahaven were without power from 6.30am on Tuesday until sometime on yesterday (Saturday) a period of at least 96 hours but probably over 100 hours. The residents of Port Wemyss and Portnahaven also had no water as their water supply is required to be pumped by electricity. The residents of Kilhoman had their electricity reconnected last night after being without power for over 108 hours.
The diesel generating power station was of no use as the cables were either blown down or damaged.
I am sure that the residents of Bute despite being visited by the tv cameras were not as long without power as some parts of Islay.
I look forward to your apology on ForArgyll.
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For Treblet: This is without doubt the worst outage we’ve heard of in the entire emergency. So Kilchoman will have had about four and a half days without power. That is totally grim. What did folk do? Break into the distillery?
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Bowmore was lit at 8am some of Port Ellen at 9am some at 3.30pm outlying districts Ardtalla and Oa direction over a period of 1 to 4 days, the last of them last night (Saturday).
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The main problem I found was the total lack of communication from SSE with their emergency helpline continually advising customers to phone back for an update in 4 hours time. Apart from my initial call on Tuesday morning was unable to speak to a person in the Portsmouth call centre until the Thursday morning. This person advised that they hoped to get everyone in the Rhinns area back online by Thursday evening which unfortunately did not prove to be the case.
There was no communication or help from either our local councillor(s) or community councillors.
Lessons must learnt from these major power cuts although I am not hopeful it will be any better if the same thing happens again.
Alex Salmond has been strangely quite regarding the crisis.
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For Treblet: Your identification of Community Councils as a source of local planning and organisation for this sort of situation is in sympathy with a similar comment from Webcraft and an excellent idea.
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Newsroom.
I do not know how the people in the Kilhoman area coped but I suspect that they had to make the best of it. Perhaps they had peat or coal fires with a back boiler which would keep them warm and provide a supply of hot water.
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couple of points SSE ( the new name for the hydro) is not English or foreign owned ,hydro electric merged with southern electric to become a Scottish/English company with the head office in Perth when the Scottish half of the company has a storm the English half come up and help out and vice versa
if any one has a question about the supply restoration during the storm i will do my best to answer.
this was the worst storm faults in my 27 years on the wires
to tell some people when there power was going to be on we first had to repair the faults on the 33,000 volt network to supply the 11,000 volt network which also was faulty once the high voltage network was live some people had to have the 240 volt wires put back on there houses, only then was there power restored
sometimes the trees fell through the 11,000 volt network after the 33,000 volt network was faulty ,so only after we repaired the first fault and made the 33,000 volt network live did the fuses blow in the 11,000 volt network indicating further faults then same again with the 240 volt network
we update the people who up date you and we try to phone them every hour if not they will phone us and press us for a restoration time , its hard for them but they do try for you. some times during storm repairs we feel the poles shake as more trees fall through the wires after we’v just told fault dispatch it’ll be on in an hour but now it’ll be six hours they then change the time there telling people and everyone loses confidence in them ,so if we give a time we try to give solid times
on the up side
I would like to thank the people who came to our depot to tell us where they had seen trees in the wires this did help to shortened repair times
i would like to thank the land owners who used there own quad bikes to help ferry equipment to some faults and the drivers who helped pull the branches off the road as we cut our way through the fallen trees to get to the faults in the first day
also thank you to everyone for there patience and understanding after several days with no power , this was not lost on our colleagues from the south of the company who came up to help ,who were impressed by the attitude of the people of Argyll
it sounds cliche but I felt proud to be from Argyll
most teams worked from first light 8am to midnight sometimes till 2 am if it got a job finished . twice as much gets done in daylight
i would like to say sorry to my wife for not being home to reassure her when the weather was at its worst and after her waiting up for me to come home me falling asleep while she was telling me about her day then leaving in the morning without saying goodbye
sorry to my son for missing his 11th birthday today and not speaking to him since Tuesday because I’m only home when hes sleeping
we’ll do something next weekend (as long as theres no gales before then!)
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For engineer: Great information – rightly increasing existing respect for what the engineers can and have to do. And it’s heartwarming to hear of your own response to the active assistance of all kinds you got from folk in Argyll – not cliched at all but inspirational.
Everyone understands that situations change in this sort of emergency, you know, and sometimes for the worse. But getting the best available information – which you obviously provide back to base – is the best possible service for the powerless, even if it does sometimes have to change with setbacks.
And if your now eleven year old son feels like writing about what his life was like during this period, we’ll be delighted to publish it as a ‘thank you’ to you for this information.
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Well done Sir and i understand the situation where it would be clearly daft to issue times for reconnection when this would be met with howls of protest if it were not forthcoming. Interesting to note this was the worst for 27 years.
great to have the views and more importantly the facts from someone who acually knows the problem and the work required to remedy same.
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Interesting point about telling the engineers ‘at the depot’ about local faults – from my experience after the storm last May it’s clear that this can help to reduce the length of ‘outages’ when there are problems all over the place that the engineers are struggling to track down.
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Frankly, I am losing the will to live reading any more of this topic, and as I like living in Argyll enough to put up with the privations it entails and want to live here for longer, I think I will read something else.
It seems to me the majority of respondents are quite happy with poor service and lack of information. Quite happy that senior management are inadequate when it comes to distributing information. Quite happy to defend failure. No doubt, in their own jobs, these people will think that the backsides of their own senior management is where the sunshine comes from.
Oh! I’ve just realised – perhaps all these people ARE the senior management.
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Maybe we’re just realistic, with a modicum of common sense, and the ability to recognise when a situation is truly severe?
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Well said, and i would imagine the (possibly silent) majority would agree.
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” Oh! I’ve just realised – perhaps all these people ARE the senior management ”
i wish i was in fact i wish i was even an Engineer , 95% of the people fixing your lines are Craftsmen though the media seems to always call them Engineers
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