Scotland

Over the weekend, on the small island of the Isle of Harris in the Western Isles of Scotland, a small primary School was almost destroyed by fire. Such an incident occurring in a city school would raise suspicion of arson but in the close knit community of Harris the locals suspect a more sinister cause.

Sir E Scott Primary School is in the main town of Tarbert and is housed in a wonderful listed building but is now in a terrible state following the fire of Saturday the 8th March 2008. Much to the alarm of everyone in the area the schools fire alarm system appears to have failed. Now this would immediately cast suspicion upon the Local Council and many would, ordinarily, assume that such a system would only fail if it had not been properly maintained. However I think that the reason it failed was the fault of the poor quality of electrical supply which continually destroys electrical equipment and certain ensures that all electrical goods last for a much lesser time on the islands than elsewhere.

In recent years I have recorded several spikes which have gone off the scale and burnt out lightbulbs before failing or dropping to well below the minimum voltage required. The truth is that dips in the power supply can cause as much, and sometimes more, damage than a spike. This terrible event is then exacerbated by the fact that it always seems to spike following a dip.

For a period of several months I had the electrical supply to my home examined because of the ridiculous number of spikes and troughs. I was disconnected from the rest of the houses in my street and put directly onto the mains (the rest of the street goes through a transformer). Unfortunately there was only a slight improvement so I now have UPS and surge protection on all electrical items in the home. Sadly I can not afford one of sufficient size to cover all electrical circuits so I have just learn to live with the fact that light bulbs only last a week or two at times.

Now the Isle of Harris has been suffering this for at least five or six years that I know of. When I moved to my current address the power supply was so bad I began to record it. I have had my equipment calibrated and it is 100% acurate. I even had a guy from the council record at the same time as me and his machine had been calibrated that morning – both machines showed spikes and toughs of the same levels.

I have already heard rumours that the electrical supply was faulty just prior to the outbreak of fire but it seems to me that if the power supply was so poor that it caused the fire it would only be a matter of seconds before the power circuits/fuses within the buildings would have tripped. Unless the fire alarm system had battery back-up power surely this would explain the failure of the system to be activated? I wonder if it is discovered that the fuses had been tripped that such a fact would be covered up?

Now I wonder this because there have been a number of unexplained fires recently and a dodgy mains electric supply could easily explain them all. However if this is true this is an absolute disaster as the cost of fixing the problem is ridiculously high and unlikely to be carried out by the electric companies involved. Last time there was a problem the local council ended up paying the electric company a sum of about £30,000 to install the equipment to provide an adequate power supply to their housing property on South Harris.

Is it not logical that the massive increases in demand for electrical energy on the Isle of Harris would, eventually, lead to a need to upgrade the systems? I hope that they get to the bottom of the fire quickly and that they investigate the ongoing problems with the electrical supply as quickly as possible. It is only by chance that there has, so far, been no loss of life and I hope and pray that things get sorted before a tragedy occurs.