Power outage

By John M. Rodgers

On Thursday evening, at the foreign language high school where I teach, the students sat busily studying. Normally, they’d be there until a bit before 11 p.m. Not this night. Everything went dark at 6:40 p.m. as a power outage rolled through the eastern edge of the city. Within seconds cheers erupted throughout the collective campus that holds three high schools and an international middle school.

In a country where record snow storms and typhoons don’t disrupt the hallowed school schedule, it was remarkable to see the students spilling into the street less than 30 minutes later.

Few students cared what had caused the welcome disruption. Yet across the peninsula, nearly 2 million households experienced blackouts, according to the Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), not to mention hundreds of banks and thousands of small businesses. The country, for the most part, had experienced a harbinger that doesn’t bode well for Korea or many other parts of the planet.

After experiencing 37 rainy days from July 1 to Aug. 24, according to the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA), Seoul and most of the country has seen summer come in September with sweltering sunny days (the high on Thursday was 31.3 degrees Celsius while the average afternoon temperature for September is 26 degrees). Massive energy demand followed as businesses, homes, schools, hospitals and the like turned to omnipresent air conditioners for relief.

Then, Thursday, those demands caught KEPCO off guard as it performed seasonal maintenance at power plants around the nation ― such maintenance requires shutdowns. The unusual surge in demand and lack of adequate supply brought the country’s reserves into the low single digits requiring controlled power cuts to avoid a catastrophe.

Still, now that power has returned, the bigger issue seems to have been effaced. The collective consternation that had people in my neighborhood standing outside their homes saying ``it does not come” in Korean, vanished as electricity returned normalcy. Nonetheless, things are anything but normal here and around the world as weather extremes wreak havoc. Here those July rains battered and saturated the nation, breaking records ― on July 27, 301.5 millimeters of rain fell on Seoul.

Now a trip to the grocery store reveals exorbitant produce prices ― something people are used to after similar weather (22 days of rain last August) ravaged crops and endangered the staple Korean kimchi.

Reports by various meteorological experts including the KMA, say Korea is becoming a subtropical zone, supported by the fact that tropical fish and subtropical coral were found off the southern coast earlier this year by the National Fisheries Research and Development Institute.

Simply, things are getting warmer, wetter and weirder here and Thursday’s blackouts point to even more unexpected occurrences where humans and the environment will clash.

This summer’s July deluge also highlighted drainage shortcomings, something Seoul has already been working to improve given 2010’s torrential rain. And even though the country ranks high in acceptance of climate change, more collective campaigns can be launched to further inform people about the threats and the need for energy conservation (an electricity rate hike would change some habits).

However, when I, as an American, take the state of affairs here and compare them with my own country, I’m embarrassed. As desperate droughts and boiling temperatures brutalize the land in states like Arizona, Oklahoma and Texas, people still say climate change is some sort of ruse. Astonishingly, Texas Governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry contends that no such change is taking place; scientists are bamboozling us to obtain research money. All the while, his state withers and cracks.

Here in Korea, green growth is well underway with LPG taxis and buses, strict emissions standards, public bike exchanges, and trials of inroad charging systems for electric vehicles. President Lee Myung-bak has repeatedly advocated such green policies and few Koreans doubt the need for green innovation. Even so, the blackout of Sept. 15 should serve as a more urgent warning to a population that has been raising energy demands every year without a second thought.

The writer is head English teacher at Daewon Foreign Language High School and the founding editor of the ``Three Wise Monkeys Webzine.” He can be reached at jmrseoul@hotmail.com.