"Your Guide to Earthquake Safety"

My experience of rolling blackout

Summary

Due to the Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant was damaged, maximum of electric power supply also decrease.
And the danger of demand becoming higher than supply have appeared.
Having recieved thatcircumstances, Tokyo Electric Power Company(TEPCO) have decided to carry out ROLLING BLACKOUT.

What is the rolling blackout?
To put it simply, it is the willful power cut.
It is carried out in any six small compartmentalized block of the Kanto district (On March 28th, the district was compartmentalized into 25 blocks.) in order to reduce the demand for electricity to make feed rate stable.

But, simultaneously, a lot of problems could be seen.
For example, whether blackout is carry out or not have become uncertain many times because information of rolling blackout's plan complicated among TEPCO, government and people many times.
Moreover, it was sometimes carried in shelters of some disaster-stricken areas and some sufferers who have refuged there were troubled.

By now, owing to nation-wide power saving and self-disipline of some events, amount of electricity consumption have decreased.
So TEPCO decided to stop carrying out rolling blackout until begining of June.
But, we won't be still able to be unpredictable.
Because they haven't settled shotage of electricity and it has been predected that electric demand will increase again in this summer.

My house's was cut off as the rolling blackout several days after of the earthquake.

Having been morning, it was bright. So it didn't matter so much.
But when it is carried out in the evening or at night, it brought a lot of trouble.

One of the worst problems was cold.
We couldn't use heaters however it was March.

In those days, average of outside's temperature was low so we have to wear a lot of clothes in order not to feel coldness.
My grandmother had had a cold because of this circumstance.

Problem of lights was also worse than any other one.
After PM 6:00, outside got darker and darker and finally we couldn't see anything.

So we put flashlights and radios on the table of living room whenever blackout is going to be carried out at night.

Without electricity, we can't use our house's water heating system.
In addition, there were times when electronic equipments' power were turned off suddenly then data being saving also vanished.

Having gone through those incidents, I came to understand how electricity which I have taken for granted that it have existed no matter what have happened is important for our daily life.