Loadshedding Causes Somerset West Security Alarms to Perform Synchronised Evening Concert
Loadshedding that hit Somerset West at 8pm on Thursday produced, as a secondary cultural event, a synchronised security alarm performance involving eleven properties on three streets that security companies, residents and at least one insomniac who recorded the whole thing on his phone described as “genuinely impressive in a deeply inconvenient way.”
The sequence began when power was cut at 20h00 and the first alarm, whose battery backup had apparently not been tested since it was installed during the previous administration, triggered immediately. A second alarm joined at 20h03, this one set off by a cat navigating the now sensor-confused premises of a property whose owner was in Johannesburg and unreachable. A third began at 20h07 for reasons that have not been determined. By 20h15 there were eight alarms active across the three streets, each cycling through its own particular repertoire and by 20h22, when the count reached eleven, a resident standing in his driveway described the combined effect as “something between an orchestra tuning and a full nervous breakdown, but louder than either.”
The alarm tones did not harmonise. They also did not stop at the same time, each resolving on its own schedule as batteries depleted at different rates, creating a tapering denouement that lasted until approximately 22h30 when the final holdout, a particularly tenacious unit at number fourteen whose battery appeared to have been installed last week, sounded its last note and the street fell silent.
Three response vehicles attended. One could not locate the specific properties in the dark because the usual landmark, a lit street number, was itself on load shedding. The cat responsible for the second alarm was located on a garden wall, apparently untroubled. The owner in Johannesburg received six missed calls and three increasingly pointed voicemails from neighbours and called back at 11pm, by which point everything had resolved itself and the conversation was largely academic.
One resident who filmed the event from her upstairs window described the full recording as fourteen minutes of “absolute chaos with a surprisingly moving ending” when the last alarm finally stopped and was replaced by silence so complete you could hear the mountain. She has not posted the video online on the grounds that it is “too real” and also that she is still hoping the neighbour with the cat does not know it was his alarm that started the sequence.
The power returned at 23h47. Several alarms sounded again briefly on restoration, as they do, because of course they did.
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