The damaging windstorm in Melbourne two weeks ago gave me an interesting insight into how poorly prepared the leadership of our energy organisations were to deal with a crisis. You could argue that a simple demonstration of the energy of Mother Nature and its effects on modern civilisation is hardly a crisis but I doubt that many of the 300,000 Melbourne households that were without power for days would agree with you.

I was one of those left in the dark both literally and figuratively for close to 55 hours. I understood that it was an “unusual weather event” and it would not be easy to get everyone quickly back onto the power supply. I didn’t mind losing everything in my fridge and freezer, having no hot water, reading by candlelight or being without my laptop, broadband internet or Foxtel. But I did mind not being able to speak to anyone at my power company…and I was surprised by just how much I minded.

When things are not going the way they should, we all look for reassurance and information to help us wait it out. The situation across Melbourne was complex and complicated and I knew that SP-Ausnet would not be able to tell me when they would get to the fallen powerlines in my street and I knew that every available repair crew member was on duty and out there working through the night to get the job done. My appreciation to them knows no bounds.

But…not once was I able to find out whether anyone at the power company knew that our powerlines were down. Our suburb was either not listed on their answering machine message as offline or being worked on. In fact, on the Friday morning, we once again woke to a cold, dark morning and the recorded message “There are no known outages in your area” Yeah, right!

My congratulations go to the one exception in all this – the CEO of Alinta, Peter McGarry, who was a shining example of “The buck stops here”. He was personally available to radio and television interviewers and the number of interviews he had done by day three was close to twenty. He took on board the concerns expressed by disgruntled customers who were unable to speak to anyone or get any information from their power company. And like his repair crews, he and his team worked long hours to stay on top of things.

An SMS service for customers to report outages and damage was quickly set up as was a website to give up to date information. I was impressed to find out that on Friday as my household entered its third day without light, power or information, Alinta had rung their 1700 customers still waiting to be reconnected to let them know how things were progressing and ask how they were getting on. Peter McGarry made sure his company looked after their customers and kept the communication coming.

When one of his linesmen was killed working to restore power to houses on the Mornington Peninsula, most of us would have understood if Peter had gone to ground and hidden out at Head Office. But that was not his style. While under enormous pressure he made time to visit the family and colleagues, made sure there were condolence notices from himself and the company in the Melbourne newspapers and I have no doubt he made time to attend the funeral as well. In contrast to my supplier, he didn’t hand any of that over to “a company spokesperson” from the PR department.

Complications and complexity are part and parcel of crisis situations where the shifting nature of the problem is a big part of the challenge of solving it. Peter and the Alinta team stepped up to that challenge, made sure they kept telling everyone what they were doing as they did it and, as far as I’m concerned, did it markedly better than the rest.