24 November 2020 - Holes in the ground
Hello everyone,
Walking up Sutton Road just after the fork with Plaisters Lane today – adjacent to what I still remember as Joyce’s stables – I came across a trench with an SSE gentleman standing in it. As I am never able to pass a hole with peering into it, I asked, as they say in South Wales “What’s occurring?”. Apparently and as you probably know, the street lights are not functioning and he was investigating the likely cause. Unfortunately the cabling is very old, making fault finding difficult, and he had discovered that just beyond where they had dug their trench the cable crossed the road so more excavations would be necessary. In my working life, amongst other things, I was responsible for our factory site facilities. We were experiencing frequent but irregular power failures, something less than ideal for a computer based organisation. The electricity company sent gentlemen from Southampton to investigate a number of times, without much success, so I became more forceful with my complaints. Eventually they drafted in an engineer from Bristol who had previously worked extensively in Weymouth, and within minutes of arriving he had identified a likely source of the problem in an underground cable some distance away which turned out to be the cause. He told me that the companies had grouped their engineers to cover larger and larger areas which meant that local knowledge was being lost. There’s nothing quite like progress, is there? I hope the street lights return soon, but this could be your opportunity to observe the night sky with less light pollution.
Stay safe, keep smiling and stay a lert
Chris