by admin | Jun 2, 2023 | Property News, St Francis
Just over ten years ago, 76 homes burnt down in the terrible fire of Sunday, 11 November 2012.
This sparked a building boom, with an amazing 38 rebuild starts within 12 months and 51 within three years.
And now, in 2023, 67 houses have been rebuilt…. unsurprisingly, but many would say sadly, only one with thatch.
Just nine left still to be rebuilt.
Five houses survived the fire, five houses that were amongst the houses that burned down …. unsurprisingly, of the five, only one had a thatched roof.
It was a terrifying evening, but as often happens with these tragedies, there was a feeling of togetherness in town for some weeks after.
by Craig Jarvis | Jun 2, 2023 | Notes From The Editor, St Francis
I thought I had everything under control. There is an inverter, batteries, and a few solar panels. Enough to get us through a few hours of load-shedding.
Sometimes we didn’t make it through four and a half hours of load shedding, more batteries would be helpful, but we were making do.
Most evenings during load-shedding, I would unplug my laptop while working, just in case of a power surge.
On Monday evening, we had a long load-shedding bout and a bit of a storm out there, with lightning and rain.
I typed away merrily during the evening, fingers whizzing across the keyboard. Then I noticed my laptop battery was down to 5%. I was working on something important, no doubt, most likely the St Francis Today puzzle page or loading up another St Francis Today writing contest entry, but I wanted more power.
So with 5% on the battery, I walked briskly to the office and plugged my laptop into the power from my backup system, not realising that this system too, was almost depleted. Little did I know that I was never going to see that laptop alive again.
The very act of plugging my laptop into power plunged the house into darkness. It was pitch-black. We have another somewhat rudimentary system of Magento lights and USB lamps, and headlamps. So I quickly found those with the light of my iPhone, lit up the house, and didn’t even think about the laptop.
‘It’s got a swollen battery,’ was the expert damage assessment on Tuesday. The battery had actually pushed against the casing and left a dent underneath the laptop. She was broken.
So apologies if this week’s news has been a bit scrappy or seemingly irregular. It has been a week of trips to repair centres and drives to the iStore in Walmer Park, often during load-shedding, with no traffic lights operating. Frustration City – population: me.
Backup? Of course, I had a backup. Unfortunately, I did something wrong on the restore, and 103 Gigs of unsorted data poured into my new laptop, including over 5008 emails from somewhere, which I am going through this weekend.
There’s a lesson to learn here about backup power, surges, load-shedding, and hard drive backups. it’s simple. Time to upgrade the backup system and get better batteries. Otherwise, this winter is going to be grim.
by admin | Jun 2, 2023 | St Francis
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