It's not been the best of weeks for the utility services in Kalkan.

This week has seen disruption to water, electricity, broadband (ADSL) and mobile telephones.  Fortunately we have still had the sea and the sun and the amazing views of Kalkan Bay, so not all is lost.  Kalkan life goes on despite these minor inconveniences.

At KTLN we try to let you know of any planned disruption to services, however these came unannounced, so we couldn't tell you about them.  Sorry.

Water
Apparently, the water was off for a few days this week as the Belediye repaired a couple of water pumps.  The supply was restored on Wednesday.  It's times like this when water storage tanks make such a difference.

Electricity
Earlier in the week, some parts of Kalkan, on the road going up towards the petrol station, were without electricity.  We saw workmen digging a number of holes in the road trying to locate the damaged underground cables.  We saw some badly charred cables on Şehitler Caddesi, close to Akbank. 

Local people we spoke to said that there can be problems on very hot days when demand for electricity goes up, with air con units on full blast.  However, we don't know for sure what exactly caused this particular outage.

It's times like this when you are glad you have a stand-by battery or generator.  One bank we visited had a generator to keep its customer systems going, but the staff were struggling to keep cool as the power did not extend to the air con units. 

We also spoke to a supermarket owner in his ice-cool shop, who was pleased that he had gone to the trouble of spending a significant sum on a powerful generator. For him and his customers, problem yok.

ADSL and mobile phones
On Thursday Kalkan had a few hours in the afternoon when the ADSL system and mobile phone network went down.  The fault did not however affect land lines.  We understand that this was a Türk Telecom problem.  This outage affected the banks, who were unable to access their systems.  ATMs were also unavailable for a time.

It's times like this when you wonder how on earth we managed before the advent of modern telecommunications.  Remember when as a child you got two empty baked beans cans and a piece of string, so you could have a long distance conversation with your friend? 

OK - perhaps this is not the most effective back up system.  Here at KTLN headquarters, up on the mountain side, we are considering investing in a set of semaphpore flags, then we will have a comprehensive back up system of water, electricity and communications.