Editorial: Power cut offers us all a reminder

Traffic lights were not working at corner Tennyson St and Hastings St, Napier, due to a regional power cut. Photo / Duncan Brown

It is amazing how reliant we are on power.

It took a 75-minute power outage in Hawke's Bay yesterday to ram that point home to most of us.

The power went out just before 4pm and it caused chaos as most people decided to head home. I was still in the office, but apparently it was bedlam out there.

Transpower later issued a statement saying the cause of the outage was simultaneous lightning strikes on two of the major transmission circuits running into the Hawke's Bay area.

They were able to restore power and a big thank you must go to all the Unison and Transpower workers who found the faults and repaired them.

For Hawke's Bay Today, our focus immediately switched to planning how we would produce today's paper. Luckily we have a Business Continuity Plan for such situations.

With offices in Napier, Hastings, Waipukurau and Dannevirke we do have some options. Our head office in Auckland also pitched in to help.

We always believed that the power would be back on when it came time to print the paper, but we had contingency plans for that as well.

This outage did not turn out to be a major drama, but it so easily could have been. We have to keep asking ourselves the question - are we ready for disasters to strike?

Do we have contingency plans at work and home to ensure that everyone is safe and that normality can be restored as soon as possible?

For those who don't, now is the time to put some in place. We may not be able to prevent nature interfering with our daily lives, but we can be ready for it when it does.