Topic: Current problems causing infrastructure failure. (Read 111 times)

This morning has brought home to me the fragility of out current social structure. I'm in a McDonalds next to an industrial estate in Portsmouth. There are two problems right now. The water pressure has failed, so there are no hot drink or fizzy ones. All they have are bottled drinks. The restaurant has some erly morning business from dog walkers and tradesmen, but they usually want coffee of shakes. The other problem is that neither WiFi channel is connecting.  I'm fairly adaptable, so I am drinking bottled water, and using the WiFi provided by the retail park administration, but a lot of customers are walking out without making a purchase. The Waitrose supermarket in Waterlooville is closing, with the loss of 125 jobs. That is another major retail shop abandoning the city centres. My 85-year old friend is self-isolating, and not allowing anyone to visit her house.

I did anticipate some of this, and that is why I provided myself with an alternative mobile lifestyle, but I'm not sure I appreciated the full extent of the changes that are on the way. Privatisation has led to poor and expensive infrastructure maintenance, and government money is being squandered on projects like the HS2 train, and this will just boost London,and weaken the rest of the country in my opinion. Then we have the stupid rush to electric vehicles, and we can't afford the infrastructure to ensure they are viable. Most tests seem to show that self-driving card are not suitable for British roads, so we can expect more deaths and problems from these id they ever become popular.

So what can we do? It looks as if Boris Johnson has an appreciation of future currency problems, so he is talking about passing laws to ensure that banks make cash available to the public for purchases. This is contrary to the general attitude of world governments, who want to move to a cashless economy. No sign of the restoration of water pressure, and there is a guaranteed response time of less than 4 hours. That doesn't mean that they will be able to fix it though.

Update - Water restored at 8am, but no explanation as to the cause of the failure.