_____WHAT'S LIFE LIKE IN A
______________metropolis without electricity?
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BY CAMERON WILLIAMSON | Down on Viaduct Basin, where the green sea of the Waitemata Harbour sloshes around the piles of Auckland's reclaimed foreshore, a busker is improvising on a Hendrix melody for no one in particular and everyone who's listening.

"This is the real Auckland unplugged," he laughs, and eases his well-worn six string into another half-familiar set.

It's refreshing to find someone taking Auckland's crisis so lightly, an antidote to the grim faces of people whose lifeblood depends on the small businesses around town, who are hurting, some breaking down in tears on live network news.

Because "unplugged" in Auckland no longer refers to the sweet strains of the acoustic alchemists, but to the collapse of the city's electricity supply, which plunged the Central Business District of New Zealand's sprawling metropolis into darkness a fortnight ago.

Now the music of Auckland is the thrum of a thousand generators perched on sidewalks and in doorways, hastily welded exhaust pipes belching diesel fumes into air already sluggish with the humidity of a subtropical summer. It's not the only thing that's changed. Around the world, people are bemused. Reports from as close as Australia have the whole city blacked out. In Indonesia people wonder if the entire country is in darkness. The reputation of a nation of innovative engineers who've harnessed the might of their wild waterways to power a techno-savvy 21st century economy is at stake.

Auckland is taking a hammering. And as the overseas inquirers ask, "How can this happen?" we ask ourselves the same question.

Auckland's crisis began two weekends ago with the failure of Mercury Energy's fourth and final power cable feeding the city. The lights went out around town, apartment building and hotel lifts stopped between floors, electronic security doors locked shut, traffic lights stared blankly at bewildered motorists.

Kiwis are not generally slow to take up the offer of an enforced long weekend, but when the lawyers and stockbrokers and accountants arrived Monday in tower-block foyers only to be told, "Your building is closed," reality began to bite.

Emergency meetings dispersed office workers to the suburbs, to branch offices, to Wellington, even to Sydney, until the normal electricity supply could be resumed.

Mercury, the country's biggest supply company, has no answers to the big questions -- why did cables fail? Why, when the capital, Wellington, has eight cables serving its CBD and the southern center of Christchurch has 10, does Auckland have only four? Why has property development been allowed to proceed headlong and outrun the city's ability to supply its essential services?

In the early days of the crisis, Auckland's mayor, Les Mills, affected a frown of deep concern and told city workers: Stay out of town, everything that can be done is being done. But he wasn't talking to his staff. On crisis Day 5, council minions were out ticketing generators for being parked on the sidewalk without permits.

For many city folk used to their underground car parks and skyscraper suites, the emergency quickly became a deep-end experiment in remote officing as laptops, faxes, modems and cell phones started connecting with each other from any hot point outside the dark zone.

In the newspapers, early headlines like "Darkness on the Edge of Town" were replaced by "Light at the End of the Tunnel" as city fathers said, "It won't be more than a week."

Then one week passed and the cables were still out, and the headlines began to read, "Into an Autumn of Gloom." Articles reported that normal power was unlikely before Easter.

Within days, Queen Street, the main drag that anchors this city of a million people, resembled a Third World capital.

Shopfronts were shuttered, litter started to gather in drifts in the windward gutters. Graffiti bombers emerged like rats from the sewers, comfortable in the knowledge that no power meant no security cameras to inhibit their tagging.

Police announced increased patrols to counter looting, pedestrians didn't linger and as dusk settled in the city, all that was needed to complete the picture of a 20th century ghost town was the tumbleweed.

And so it went. Apartment dwellers who were able climbed stairwells in darkness, camping dozens of floors above dark streets. Others were temporarily offered empty flats in the suburbs. Only the hardiest of news agents and corner stores stayed open.

The tourists who mean so much to this little country's economy poured off cruise ships and airplanes expecting to find a sophisticated seaside capital; they might as well have been in some backwater banana republic.

Tourism Auckland has been directing the tourists away from the CBD and pointing them toward the spectacular attractions beyond the city fringe -- where many of the museums, parks, beaches and restaurants are doing more business than ever. But most still need to return every evening to their power-starved inner-city hotels, which are relying on hired generators to stay open and to function at anything approaching normality.

N E X T+P A G E+| Business off at the brothels

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