When Power Fails.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18096, 11 June 1924, Page 8

When Power Fails.

When power fails in Chrißtchurch the men light pipes and the women candles —if it is dark—and wait till the fault is corrected: when it fails in Auckland everybody takes hysterics. Saturday's "Herald" contains an'account, less than half a column long, of a 54-minutes' partial failure at 11 a.in. on Friday, and the editorial comment begins in this way: "Auckland suf- " fered shame again yesterday at tho " hands of the Electric Power Board: '' for practically an hour every car on "the tra.mrails stood idle, mutely pro- " claiming that something had gone "wrong." A little later the "lay " mind," beholding those mute /proclaimed of trouble, is "inevitably " constrained to ask why such a con- " tingency was not provided against,'' till in the end we have this angry declaration; "The long-suffering public " will not be put off with mere "words. It has borne too much'to "be content with an attempted ex- " planation couched in electrical and " engineernlg phraseology, and looks " to the Board to save it from a repe- " tition of yesterday's indignity and " inconvenience." And we have not quoted those passages to ridicule tho "Herald." The "Herald," it must bo assumed, knows its public, and also knows its own business, but we canflot help wondering what words it would have used if the failure had been a thing of hours instead of minutes. Christchurch suffered a failure recently which began at 4.30 p.m., when darkness was approaching; which continued right on past the closing hour for offices and shops, when everybody wanted to use the tramcars; and which was not fully and permanently restored till long after everybody was in bed. And neither public nor Press made any complaint. There has of course been no complaint at any time in Christchurch which would sound like a complaint to Auckland, but even by the standards of the South we have been amazingly long-suffering and meek. And we have probably been r wrong. Though accidents will happen it is pos. Bible that the Auckland reaction to inconvenience is the only one that officials understand. All over Canterbury—Timaru, for example, lost 48 J hours of current last month in 29 days —there has been a more generous toleration of accidents and irregularities than is good for those whose duty it is to provide against them. The Auckland noise may be a little loud. It may be a trifle more absurd than the more "solemn South could copy. But

the Public Works Department expects noise, and does not understand patience, and we might do worse for it in future than offer it some Aucklandese.