In the 1980s, I worked for Eskom for two years. I was the senior engineer: operations for the Eastern Cape, which meant that the daily operation of the interconnected power system was my responsibility.

As I recall, there were 12 controllers who reported to me, all of whom worked at the control centre, at Pembroke, located halfway between East London and King William’s Town. Our target was to have no more than one outage per consumer for each kilometre of power line a year.

Owing to the number of kilometres and the number of consumers, this, in effect, meant that we would have to have no more than ten power line faults a day. For each outage, the control centre would dispatch a repair team, give instructions, make arrangements for alternative supplies and record the fault.

At monthly meetings, we would gather and discuss ways of doing things differently to make the power system more secure. It is no exaggeration to say that I could, and still can, give a lecture to any group of electrical engineers who have not operated power systems and lose them in the first few sentences and keep them lost.

Electrical engineering is very complicated. Occasionally, I was asked to give a presentation to nonengineering Eskom staff to explain what the operations department did. I did my best but the problem was they knew so little and knew not that they knew so little that there was no point to start from.

I was reminded of all of this by some experiences which occurred recently. The first was with an advocate and an attorney. They were trying to defend a case where it was claimed that a power line had a fault that had damaged a whole lot of equipment in a factory. The factory in question was supplied at 400 V three phase. I tried to explain to them that the power line in question was rated at 11 000 V and that nothing could be done to the power line which could affect the 400 V side of the supply system.

The advocate badgered me and badgered me and then asked me what would happen if the power line conductor broke in half and the ends ended up on the ground. I said, well, the earth fault current will flow and trip the main circuit breaker. “Flow where?” demanded the advocate. “Through the ground,” I replied. He looked at me as if struck. Was I seriously suggesting, he asked, that electricity flowed through the ground? Yes, I said, indeed it does. “What about lightning?” he trumpeted. “If electricity flows through the ground, people near to a strike will be killed!”

I said, many are. And then he told me that I would find out that I was wrong.

The second experience was with a person who had decided that an Eskom power line had had a fault that set alight to his veld and had burnt out his garage and boathouse. So I went to look at the local Eskom depot records and found that (a) there had been a fire (b) the Eskom staff had driven to the fire when it was reported that their power line poles were on fire (they were not) and (c) no Eskom power line had tripped on that day. So I told this guy all this. He intimated darkly that both Eskom and I were lying.

So I wonder. An opinion I give on causes of electrical interruption is based on some pretty solid experience with a power system, which, at the time, had over 32 000 km of power line. But very often, when asked my opinion on what happened in an electrical fault, the person I am talking to disagrees with me. Why? On what authority? It seems that electricity makes experts out of idiots. People have a vague idea of how a power line operates and comfort themselves with the thought that it is just some wires connecting one point or another. That I and Eskom staff are idle fools, anxious to cover up poor designs and lack of technical expertise. Why, I can’t imagine.