Sanya Expat

...Sanya, China Power Plant Explosion - 100,000 People Without Electricity For 3 Days - How Did We Survive and Cope? ....well that's a rather dramatic and accurate headline yet I have to admit it's overblown a bit too...

Follow up:

...such a headline say, in America, would seem to beg for a national or at least regional disaster response - needing the governor to declare emergency relief services, etc. etc. drama American style...statistics on how much business revenue is being lost per hour, etc...

Was it like that here in Sanya the last 3 days? In a simple word...NO

The story goes like this...about midnight on Sunday there was a sudden loss of power city wide followed by a huge, and yes I do mean it was a "HUGE FILL THE WHOLE SKY HEY WAIT A SEC ARE WE ABOUT TO BE VAPORIZED KINDA FLASH" coming from over the Lu Hui Tou hillside no more than 600 meters from where we were standing on our apartment balcony...a few seconds later we witnessed a giant ball of fire exploding upward, rising into the sky...keeping in mind that the fire had to rise higher than the mountain hillside in order for us to be able to see it, you can surmise that's a pretty serious ball of fire...another couple of flashes and balls of fire later and there you go...I don't think that the explosion took any Sanya real estate with it as many of us had just witnessed the Lu Hui Tou district power plant essentially blow up...somehow we knew the electricity wasn't coming back on "in an hour" and our next thought was simply the sad reality that some workers may also just have been killed or seriously injured too.

And so we, and much of Sanya, Hainan and the Sanya tourists at the Sanya hotels and resorts spent the last 3 days without electricity...yet life seemed to go practically go on as usual...oh wait, there was partial electricity here and there due to some hotels and buildings having generator backup electricity...so instead of working on the computer and internet, I studied my European language books, read through a couple of other books I've been wanting to catch up on and made many more business phone calls to partners and clients rather than send them emails...we have gas hot water and gas stove, which most homes in town also have, so we could still cook and clean and take showers...another reason why such an electric blackout back in the U.S. seems much worse...most stoves and water heaters are electric, not natural gas...we even ate at a local Sanya restaurant today which was still serving much of its menu...Hong Kong style dim sum, selections in classic bamboo baskets steamed on the cart by a propane tank, and bowls of baked clay pot rice which were heated on coal burners...neither requiring electricity...yes, we lost quite a few items in the refrigerator but we went down to the harbor yesterday and bought a couple of big chunks of ice which kept a few items cold....

While I know everyone likes a dramatic story, the local reaction was more like "Hey, the electricity is out and will probably be out for 2-3 days..."Uh uh...yea it seems that's what's going on so..." and life went on without too much dramatic inconvenience here in Sanya, Forever Tropical Paradise :)

...about 2 hours ago, Wednesday evening 10pm, the power finally came back on...I'm happy to be able to conveniently get on line again in the convenience of my own office and we'll probably sit down on the couch and enjoy watching a DVD too...and even pal John's weekly Wednesday nite poker game was "poker by candlelight"...hey what's wrong with that?...soI must say that during the last 3 days I was so busy still doing what I do and making the minor adjustments to such a "disaster" that it seems the event has quickly and quietly come and gone...belying the gravity of the typical headline such a story typically gets...as a local police officer we were chatting with said to us..."the equipment was old and there was an explosion, so now its good new better equipment will be installed"...Cheers, M

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Key Words: Sanya Hainan News Update City Explosion Power Outage Blackout