Due to the typhoon that hit Cebu, power is still out in many areas even after more than a month.
In Japan, typhoons sometimes cause power outages. However, they do not last long.
I once experienced a power outage in Japan due to a typhoon that lasted for four or five days.
Typhoon No. 18 made landfall in Kumamoto Prefecture on September 24, 1999.
I was hit by this typhoon when I was working at a sales office in Izumi City, Kagoshima Prefecture.
The wind blew so fiercely at night that I could see the windowpanes flexing in the wind. The storm was so fierce that a light car parked in the parking lot flipped over, and many houses actually had broken windows.
This typhoon collapsed 13 steel towers of Kyushu Electric Power Co. in southern Kumamoto Prefecture. The towers were designed to be undamaged by wind speeds of up to 54 meters per second, but the maximum wind speed at the time was over 80 meters per second (Koshiki Island, Kagoshima Prefecture), which is a record. Since these towers were installed from Yatsushiro City to Minamata City in Kumamoto Prefecture, a wide area from the southern part of Yatsushiro City to Minamata City and Izumi City lost power.
At that time, I realized how inconvenient it would be without electricity.
First of all, there was no information. There were no smart phones as we know them today, and with only cell phones, information was limited. I could listen to the radio in my car, but unless the disaster area was in the prefectural capital or a large city, there was no coverage of the disaster.
So we have no idea when the power will be back on.
At night, we had to rely on candles and flashlights.
Even when I went outside, it was pitch black, and the only place that had lights on was the municipal hospital with its generator.
On the way home from drinking by candlelight at the open izakaya "Ton-chan," I looked up and saw a star in the sky. Normally, I can only see the Big Dipper or Orion, but without the lights of the city due to the power outage, I saw the Milky Way Galaxy in the sky.
It was only yesterday that we started living with electric lights. It was only about 120 years ago, at the end of the Meiji era, that ordinary households began to have electric lights.
Until then, people lived their lives looking up at the stars in the sky on blackout nights. That is how familiar the stars must have been to them.
It may be said that the lack of electric lights was the reason why the stars were pieced together to form the stories of the constellations and astronomy was born from the movement of the stars.
There are still power outages where the children live, but I hope that when the power comes back on, they will feel the gratitude for electricity and also realize the advantages of living without it.
