Sunday 23^rd August 2020

Sri Lanka had a total nationwide failure of the national grid in the early afternoon today, Monday 17^th August 2020.  We are told that a sub station failure was the catalyst and that the alternative energy sources caused an impossibility to keep the frequency in bounds when reconnecting parts of the network, but we don\’t really know yet.  It could be so many things; accidental and not.

We are lucky at our condominium, because there is a whopping great diesel generator in an outbuilding.  It has sounded like being on the deck of a cross channel ferry all afternoon and evening with the omnipresent hum of a large capacity compression ignition engine at constant RPM under heavy load.  We were offline for barely 90 seconds, so clearly everything worked. Likewise for offices; they having backup power too as shorter and more localised failures are quite common.  

You can imagine the traffic chaos with no signals as it is bad enough even with them.  I don\’t know a more selfish and reactive (no planning) nation of drivers.  Many areas have of course had no water supply, too.  Parts of the island are now back on line, but not yet central Colombo where only those premises with generators have lights on.  Steve says that it was a good test of business continuity planning – but in the opposite direction to what\’s normally expected; the plan is normally to distribute staff away from the office due to an emergency, not have them already all working from home and then have to bring key personnel back to the office before laptop batteries ran out!  All was good.

Our generator was switched off around midnight, while Steve was still working. 

On Tuesday we had similar issues, but it lasted only a few seconds.  We have been woken up by power cuts as kid’s digital clocks make noises when switched on. We got home today and again the clock on our oven is flashing so we know, power was off, even if for split seconds. Who knows if this is significant? We just have to wait and see.

Rennie