St Helena goes back to the 1990s.

This morning SURE’s UK service provider disconnected our island’s connection to the Internet at 05:45h for “an hour”. The connection was not actually restored until just after 10am.

In those four hours the island had no Internet, or anything that depended on it.  No external email; no Skype; no ‘distance learning’ (a problem both at PAS and the Community College); no social networking such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whatever; no Wikipedia; no Google.  For all of that time we were living back in the 1990s (though then we all would have had fax machines – does anyone still use these in 2019?)

This disconnection demonstrates how vulnerable St Helena is to breakdowns in our tenuous connection to the outside world.  Physically we only get one flight a week and one ship a month, but in recent years we have been able mostly to get around that with an, admittedly slow, but at least operable real-time link.  We found out this morning how dependent we are on that link.  It was not nice!

Imagine what would happen if a big rock fell off the hillside are bent that great big satellite dish up at the Briars into a heap of twisted scrap metal?  How would we all cope for the many months it would take to replace it?  It doesn’t bear thinking about, but I hope that is something our Disaster Planning people HAVE considered, and I hope they’ve come up with a workable solution too.

Otherwise we’d better start breeding long-range carrier pigeons......