Storms

Storms and outages

Dirty power after a cell goes through, generators that will not kill you, and the moment a blackout becomes an emergency.

Dark storm clouds rolling over the Australian landscape

Photograph: Alex Tomlinson. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source on Wikimedia Commons. Also listed on our image credits page.

Adelaide’s storms are short and theatrical. A cell comes off the gulf or collapses over the Hills, the sky goes green, and for twenty minutes the city sounds like a roofing merchant falling down a stair. Then the power either holds or it does not. What happens in the hour after restoration — the surge, the wet meter box, the fridge that never quite sounds right again — is the part a lot of “emergency electrician” pages skip.

This hub stays with that hour, and with the longer outages that follow a heatwave or a transmission event. After the storm is about what to turn on last and what to leave off. Blackouts, generators and changeover switches is about not back-feeding the street. When to call an emergency electrician is a triage note, not a slogan. Trees and powerlines is for the suburbs where the plane trees and the service mains have been arguing since the 1920s.

SA Power Networks runs the poles and wires. Life-threatening faults are still 000, then the network emergency line. We write the household side: the board, the generator, the decision to stay or go. Pair these essays with home electrical safety if the storm has left a smell, and with energy if you are now shopping for a battery because the last outage lasted until breakfast.

Overhead suburban power lines running above houses and trees

Trees, service mains and Adelaide’s overhead streets

Plane trees and service mains have been arguing in these suburbs since the 1920s. Private canopy is yours to manage; network assets are not yours to prune. Nobody sensible does this work from a ladder.

A portable petrol generator on a concrete slab

Blackouts, generators and changeover switches

A portable generator is not a plug with ambitions. Without a changeover switch it can back-feed the street. This is the unhurried version of not killing a linesperson.

Hub introduction word count: 222.