On Thu, 2 Aug 2018 23:34:48 +0100, Steve Walker wrote:

That won't be of much use to someone with a health problem who
wakes
up one morning and finds that the power went off 5 hours ago; or
for
the able bodied who similarly find that power has been off for
some
time and they are isolated due to deep snow - as happened to many

people recently!

Sure, but the later don t need to call anyone because there is
nothing anyone can do about that.

If our power is off I call the DNO, we are the only customer on the
end of about 1/4 mile of, fused, single phase 11 kV. If that section
has failed or the fuse(s) blown they won't know. If they don't know,
they can't fix it...

It was bad enough that army helicopters were dropping supplies - that's
not going to happen if no-one knows that they are stuck there without
power and quite possibly without heating because of it.

It would have been better if the Chinook had actaully dropped the
supplies at the many places that where still cut off after 7 days,
rather than at the village halls, or if they had to drop at the
village halls have some control on who got the supplies...

The villagers could get out by 4x4 from day 2 and you could get off
The Moor on day 3 (not that it did you any good as all the
supermarkets had had the bread, milk, and fresh veg shelves stripped
by the panic buyers).

I know some one who was getting low on fire wood so when the Chinook
flew past decided to go down to the village and see what was
available. To do that he had to go to town and back out as the short
way was still blocked. By the time he got there, nothing was left...

But it appears that no one who needed to know knew which of the
scattered properties where occupied. Mind you if you have Chinook as
your delivery method, you just need to fly slowly past places at a
couple of hundred feet and the people will emerge. Chinooks are
*very* loud and at that sort of distance impossible to ignore, if
only beacasue the windows will be threatening to come in on each
WHOP.

--
Cheers
Dave.