At this time of the year almost all Finns will start asking themselves why they live in this country – well, almost everyone I know anyway. If you've never been in Finland in December, I can tell you: it's dark. A couple of hours of light per day makes everyone a dull boy or girl.

But as always, we gripe about it a bit and then the cold hits. We then gripe about that for awhile and before you know it, there's spring in the air. And nobody I know gripes about spring.

But now I was going to talk to you about storms. Last Saturday I was sitting by the fire, generally enjoying myself and listening to the increasing winds blowing outside my house. All of a sudden everything went black and stayed black. Power outage! Candle Time!

No drama to talk about, we experience those a couple of times per year and the only ones not really enjoying it are computers and fridges. Well, get yourself an UPS and there's only the fridge left to worry about, right? Actually, when looking out the window – in the aforementioned darkness – you come to realize how much of our society is depending on a steady stream of electricity. And when everything goes down at once (there where 500 households without electricity), you are going to have a problem.

Trees falling over power lines, photo by Kronoby Elverk

In this particular case, there was one tree leaning on a line. So just remove the tree and we're good? But there's no shortage of trees in Finland and the tricky bit is: if a tree falls over your line, you will have to find it – if two trees fall over you lines, you won't necessarily know about the second tree before you fix the first. If a lot of trees are falling, you will eventually get quite exhausted. And it's so dark.

So why am I telling you about storms? Why not move closer to the fire, light some more candles and trust the Utility company to fix it? Yes I do that, but at InPlace we also like to provide a small helping hand in finding those trees and enabling the Utility guys to get home a little earlier. If you want to know how, please check out the Utility section at www.riskgis.fi to find out a little bit more. You'll need electricity to do it, but that's why we are here.

I want to leave you with a positive idea of the darkness. The photo below was taken at noon New Years Eve 2011. The sun was barely up and the temperature was –25ºC but still I was treated to a very rare rainbow.

Ain't life grand?

Yours,

Thomas