Storm Darragh ravaged Dartmoor, leaving the inhabitants without either water or power. (Image: Getty)
Storm Darragh ravaged Dartmoor, leaving the inhabitants without either water or power. I lit my fire more for light than heat, located my candle supply and invited a neighbour around for drinks as there was not much else we could do. Naturally, however, people wanted information. The water supply failed at 10am and came back shortly after 10.30pm and a wonderful lady called Rose from South West Water encouraged customers with the news that they had managed to fix up generators and even though she could not predict when normality would return she could assure me that there was progress. It helped.
I only wish that the Rose approach were shared by the awful National Grid. I came home to a power cut at tea-time and, ringing the emergency line, was told by an automatic answering machine that the electricity would be restored by 6pm the following evening.
That must have caused sinking hearts to people with freezers stocked up for Christmas but I simply did not believe it because they had pulled that trick before. The Grid “information” service just picks a fantastically long time-scale, repeats it endlessly and then expects you to be relieved and happy when the issue is resolved much earlier.
To test this, I rang several times and found the message always the same and yet the power came back on at 2am, some 16 hours before the estimated time. I subsequently got a text, telling me that the engineers had been working very hard and if I had any more problems, I should phone the same number where doubtless I would get a similarly useless message.
Nobody expects storms of that order of magnitude not to do damage. No reasonable person expects everything to be put right in five minutes flat. Nobody expects definitive wait times. Pretty well everybody will just take belt-and-braces measures and most will check up on the vulnerable. In short we just get on with it, for days on end if need be.
Yet we do need to know what is going on, if only in order to make various decisions. That is why Rose, who could put no definite time on the process, was still helpful because she could say what advances were being made, whereas the National Grid with its automated misinformation was not.