It’s electric in Lloyd, and electricity is something I don’t take for granted.
Coming from small town B.C. you get used to random blackouts because maybe a bird hit a transformer. Which was a real thing that happened to me just weeks after moving.
It wouldn’t be long for the original Lloydminster settlers to get amped up. The powerful currents came to town in 1907 when the Morison brothers opened the first steam-powered plant.
The plant was run by different individuals and small companies until 1955 when transmission lines finally arrived, run from a larger plant in Vermilion.
Farmers, however, didn’t get on board as they were trying to convince Alberta to allow co-operative rural electrification associations. It didn’t take long by 1953 about 20,000 farms had power.
While on the other side of the border, farmers in Saskatchewan thought electricity was too expensive and they didn’t see how it would help their daily tasks.
In 1949, Saskatchewan Power became a crown corporation eventually bringing electricity to about 40,000 farms.
Of course, with electricity comes another advancement, the electric fridge. That must have been quite the sight.
Instead of carefully planning how and when you got your food for dinner, you could just throw it in the fridge. It kept everything cold, and it was exactly what people needed, they likely didn’t know they needed it though.
Electricity in the modern age has changed the way we do basically everything. Right now, I’m sitting at a computer, lights on overhead, with heat on in the building and a portable heater next to me.
Then I’ll go home, turn the lights on in my heated apartment and likely watch TV or boot up my computer. Dinner will be made on an electric stove with meat and everything else we need coming out of an electric fridge and freezer.
Even just thinking about it now, I could not imagine a life without electricity and not long ago the world’s population survived without it.
Those in Lloydminster came here on horses or walked, they didn’t have the modern conveniences that we have now.
I feel as though if we went into a blackout now we’d be entirely and utterly, screwed. Our dependence on electricity has become, potentially too much, not that I’m doing anything to help the situation.
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