A power outage resulted in a shutdown of Melbourne’s CityLink tollway tunnels today around 9am, for several hours. Apart from the obvious electronic signs that rely on power, I assume it affected lighting and exhaust pumps.

According to the Herald-Sun, Citylink spokeswoman Jean Ker Walsh said: “We have rebooted the systems that allow our operators to manage the tunnels safely.” So there you go. They rebooted the tunnel. Ms Ker Walsh also mentioned on the evening TV news that they’d be upgrading their UPS!

Interestingly on the Herald-Sun’s RSS feed, this story came through in the early afternoon. The feed claimed there was an attached picture, but it turned out not to be a picture of gridlocked cars or an empty motorway — rather it seemed to be a picture of cricket players.

The other effect of the shutdown was the Citylink web site also appeared to lose power… or perhaps it was just snowed under by the traffic. Like some other transport providers, they didn’t cope well under stress.

The Vicroads web site kept running under the load, though apart from showing slow traffic in the area, didn’t contain specific information relevant to motorists who might be caught there. I assume the information for radio reports and the like are gathered by phone, not off the web sites.