Electricity Outages At Home

I was agonising over outages at my house over the weekend. How frustrating it was! 

On Saturday afternoon, the sky turned dark and it looked like it was finally going to rain. I was glad as it would definitely provide an immense relief to the hot weather, and also improve the air quality. 

I was at home at the time. I had turned on the living room lights, and was watching Youtube on my TV.

It started to rain at about 4pm, and soon, it intensified. Suddenly, the lights flickered. I stood up, looked outside and watched the heavy downpour in horror. The rain was near horizontal as the gusty wind lashed relentlessly. Moments later, the house went dark. 

I thought the circuit breaker was tripped. But it wasn't. I checked the electricity meter just outside my front door, and it was not lighted. So I looked around my neighbourhood. The house opposite had lights on .... So I got worried.

I immediately checked the Sarawak Energy app for outages. My area was not listed. So I made a call to its hotline. It was difficult speaking to the Interactive Voice Response. There was a bit of a lag was I had to wait for the computer to process what I said and give me back a response. It also got my address wrong. I was flustered. So I said I wanted to speak to an operator. True enough, I was immediately connected to a staff. It sure was much better to speak to a person instead of a computer! My report was submitted immediately. Because of the bad weather, all their technicians were deployed at the time, and the sraf assured me that they would get back to me within an hour. They kept their word, and  30 minutes later, I was contacted by a technical team.

By this time, the rain had stopped ... and some of my neighbours came outside of their houses. Only then did I find out that there were a few other houses that also blacked out. Just then, the technicians arrived, and I told them the problem. They said they would go check the transformer nearby .... 10 minutes later, the electricity came back on. Thank goodness! 

The heavy rain had caused a havoc in some parts of the city. When I checked Facebook later on, in fact, a lot of trees were uprooted, damaging electricity and telecommunications transmission lines, and also blocking traffic. Flash floods hit multiple areas, and cars were seen to be floating in water at the low-lying areas. Roofs flew off and firemen were seen to be clearing debri from residential areas. The Kuching Food Festival was in its penultimate night, and the rain had damaged some of the stalls. The Unesco Gastronomic Pavillion was completely destroyed. 

Then on Sunday morning, another power outage occurred at my house. And it looked suspiciously that only my house was affected. So again, I contacted Sarawak Energy. That morning, I had to wait longer for the the technicians to come since they had ongoing jobs to do first. I got really restless waiting. They only came about 2 hours later. After checking, the electricity was restored, but the technician advised me to change my circuit breaker since it was already worn. So I paid him to do it - RM250. It has been two days, and the power supply seemed to be stable now.