ELECTRIC UNDERGROUND

摘要

MY FIRST GLIMPSE into Adelaide's humming underground is through the most unlikely of places. Electricity utility company workers, led by Kym Newbold, are leading us not through a manhole in the pavement as I had expected, but through a busy bistro kitchen in the Ruthven Mansions apartments on Pulteney Street. It is here — between a battered old microwave and shelves of cleaning supplies — that an unobtrusive entrance to an electricity substation sits, locked and labelled. This substation has been in use since the late 1960s, and while the building above has undergone numerous facelifts, the majority of the gauges and panels down here are original electromechanical relays. Obsolete handwritten instructions are pinned to a board next to laminated warnings. An exhaust fan rumbles and the ground thrums. It's roomier than I had anticipated, and the units are larger than the green boxes you see on the sides of busy streets. Underground units such as these — with 33,000 volts of live electricity coursing through them — are out of the way for safety reasons.