Camping out overnight because of a power outage or so we thought.

A power outage? Yes you read that right. It also came as a rude shock to me after I travelled through three (3) continents, over fifteen thousand (15,000) kilometers from Lagos, through Addis Ababa, to Dublin and then Toronto; only to experience an outage two weeks after settling down here.

It’s all thanks to the weather yesterday that was incredibly strange. The day started out rainy, then suddenly turned around in the afternoon and was became very sunny. At about 2pm local time yesterday, I began to hear huge gusts of wind zapping through the house. You know the kind of breeze that if you were in Lagos, you just knew that a heavy downpour ☔☔☔ was about to break and in it’s aftermath there would be power outages for days, flavoured with some flooding, if you are lucky?

The wind continued like that for more than four hours unending, but with no rain. The breeze was so fast, moving at about 90 kilometers per hour that the neighbour next door sat in her car in her driveway for about 30 minutes deciding whether to drive out or not. When the wind finally stopped, it had wrecked more havoc than I thought. Roofs had been partially or completely blown off; huge trees has split into almost equal halves blocking off main roads; power lines had been affected and one person pronounced dead. You can read about it here.

In Stouffville where I’m currently living with family friends, we thought we had escaped the wind only with a partially dangling roof… Until this evening when the lights suddenly blinked off. We were then notified by Hydro one – the equivalent of NEPA in Nigeria- that the outage will continue through this night into tomorrow morning. Z- my host promptly informed me to get an overnight bag ready so her family and I could head over to her parents house in another part of town that thankfully had their lights on.

Fortunately, as we were packing our bags, the lights flickered back up. We didn’t have to stay in the dark as long as Hydro One had informed us. True to form and for the culture, I had to exclaim, ‘Up NEPA’. The ‘NEPA’ service here delivers and in good time too.

All is well that ends well ??