LESSONS OF DARKNESS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 17, 21 January 1939, Page 12

LESSONS OF DARKNESS

The failure on several occasions this week of the electric power supply will have brought home to most people the complete dependence of the community, under modern conditions, on this universal form of energy, distributed in New Zealand from distant sources over almost every part of the country. Its very universality and the myriad uses to which it is put have made electricity so intimate a part of everyday life that people are apt to forget that it is not a free gift of Nature, like air, but has to be generated by costly machinery from stored-up energy in other forms, like water on high levels, coal, and oil, and distributed by an equally costly and elaborate network of -transmission lines and subsidiary plant, all under the control of highly-trained experts. In a sense, it is all as delicate as a spider's web at the mercy of Nature and Man. Salt carried by strong winds from the sea can break the continuity of current on transmission lines and interrupt the normal course of life in a city or even a province. Terrorists, in their hatred of society, may produce the same effect by deliberate destruction. It is then that the guardians of this very lifeblood of modern society rally together and sally out to restore the whole circulatory system. On their eternal vigilance depends not only the comfort and convenience but the very continuity of civilised life. It would be easy to enlarge on the lighter side of last week's intervals of sudden darkness with households searching for fag-ends of candles or any other surviving remnants of the illumination of a past age. Such predicaments show again our dependence on electricity and the complete faith placed in the supply and the staff that tends to it. Our experience should make us appreciate how much the electric supply system has done to raise the standard of living of the community, something that can hardly be reckoned in pounds, shillings, and pence. If it has meant in return-that modern civilisation is jnore delicately organised and closely interlocked in mutual interdependence than.the civilisations of past ages, the gain has surely been worth the price. , '