| Carradale suffered another loss of electricity supply late yesterday afternoon when Scottish Power took us off the temporary generator and re-connected us to the permanent mains supply. The obvious time to do this in order to cause the least disruption to subscribers would have been in the middle of the night but no, the Scottish Power engineers chose 5pm on a Sunday, just as many households were preparing to sit down to dinner. Did they think to give people any warning about this? Did they heck! It was only by chance that this correspondent received 15 minutes warning whilst enjoying a beverage in The Glen Bar and Restaurant, where the engineers had been having their tea. | ![[Mobile Generator in Carradale Surgery Carpark]](../clips/bigger/genny2.jpg) |
| As they were leaving one happened to mention that the power was about to go off 'for maybe 30 minutes to an hour' while they re-connected the mains supply. As it was the power was off for a little over 2 hours. | |
![[Are Scottish Power Clueless?]](../clips/clueless.gif) Scottish Power | One resident who questioned the engineers about both the timing and the lack of warning tells us he was told that it would take too long to go round all the houses, and that the generator might be needed somewhere else. Not surprisingly it is still sitting in the Surgery carpark this morning, as our photo shows, and providing warning to householders didn't seem to cause the water company any difficulty when there was a problem with the drinking water supply recently. This was quite simply a complete lack of thought and consideration for subscribers. The generator wasn't needed elsewhere, and would have been difficult to move any distance in the middle of the night anyway. The engineers clearly knew well in advance that they would be shutting off the power - they were in the pub from about 4pm and could easily have told people then, giving us the chance to ring round the village and so enable people to pass on the message to their neighbours. With the generator still in the carpark this morning there is no reason why it could not have been left running for another few hours, allowing for a more orderly switch-over when people had less need of the power and could have been given warning. As it is, I wonder how many homes had their Sunday dinner ruined? Ours certainly was. |