Flooding Us With Old Ways Simple As Abc
Newcastle Herald
Friday June 15, 2007
ONE of the things last weekend's disaster showed was that new technology isn't the best technology in every circumstance.
The most obvious example was cars, of course. Where cars from before the mid-1980s before computers and electronic ignition and fuel injection would have come through the floods with nothing much that a spray of WD-40 in the distributor couldn't fix, many of the modern whizzbang cars have been left literally up the creek.You've got to wonder about the practice of many car makers of putting the vehicles' computers so close to the floor level. And the floods made the electric window fashion look pretty self-defeating.I've always disliked electric windows. They seem such a troublesome and inefficient replacement for the old winder-handle. But when a car's electronics and window motors are shorted out by floodwater, they're a potential death-trap. Again and again I heard of stranded people who struggled to break windows or who had to clamber into back seats in cars which luckily still had manual windows for rear passengers.Another issue was the cordless telephones now so common in our homes. Useful as these devices are, they suffer from one dreadful drawback: they don't work when the power goes off. Yes, the batteries operate the handsets, but the base stations must have power too, otherwise the whole system is useless.All over Newcastle hundreds of people thought their phone lines were dead, but in many cases it was simply that their only phones were cordless. Attempts to use mobiles were often unsuccessful too, because some mobile stations had lost power and so many people were trying to do the same thing the overloaded network began to fail.Surprisingly, many people didn't realise that all they had to do was pull their cordless base station out of their phone socket and plug in an old-style non-cordless phone. Instruction booklets for cordless phones often mention the wisdom of keeping at least one non-cordless plugged in somewhere in the house, just in case of a blackout. This incident reinforces that message.The disaster also highlighted our dependence on electricity. Even many people with gas appliances found they couldn't light their space or water heaters because they relied on mains power for ignition. The fact that so many people have barbecues with LPG bottles proved a huge boon, and even little camping stoves were keenly sought in the stores on Saturday morning.Most conspicuously, the large-scale blackouts wiped out TV and internet for many people, bringing the good old-fashioned battery transistor radio back into its own. Luckily almost every household still has some kind of battery radio, so had access to the airwaves despite the destruction of powerlines. We're lucky we still have a local radio station in ABC 1233 that had the resources and ability to use that last unbroken line of communication to best advantage. Let's hope we never lose that.gray@theherald.com.au
© 2007 Newcastle Herald
