Yesterday evening, just after Rexon and Alex came upon Karula on Gowrie cutline, a huge storm hit Djuma. WE immediately executed our bad weather plan, which involves getting the game drive vehicle under cover, disconnecting all antennas, powering everything down and the final control shut down procedure. The storm carried on for hours. Monstrous lightning struck all around Vuyatela. We think that the staff village as well as the tower at Jurie and Pippa’s house received direct hits. At about 01:00 AM the worst appeared to be over, so Jan began slowly bringing all the systems back on line. Gowrie waterhole camera would not restart and the Internet connection to the video server in Pretoria would not re-establish.
At first light Jan went to the Gowrie camera and began checking all systems. It didn’t take long for him to realise that the UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply), buried underground near the camera had failed to restart. He has been forced to power the system directly, which is fine for a while, but WE will need to get this restored before the next big storm.
The Internet connection to the video server was still down. Now you can tell when this happens, because if you see the ‘sorry’ slide it means that the server cannot connect to the encoder at Djuma and usually that means there is a problem with the data line. WE reported the fault early this morning and within a few hours Telkom was able to trace and repair the problem.
So although WE took several direct hits … nothing can stop a dynamic team, committed to broadcasting LIVE to you from the African bush … its in our nature.