Timeline - v8 - Master Addons

Automation programme · 1982–1998

Sixteen years to take the last keeper off the last rock, and a decade of argument before it.

Automation was resisted, and reasonably: a keeper on a rock is a witness as well as a lamp. What follows is the programme that was delivered, not the one announced in 1981.

1982

First conversions

Three shore stations in the first year, all of them already reachable by road. The difficult ones were left alone until the monitoring system had proved itself through a winter.

1986

Telemetry over landline

Status reported to a single control room every fifteen minutes. The first winter produced 2,400 false alarms, almost all of them from one supplier’s humidity sensor.

1989

Rock stations begin

Helipads before anything else. A rock conversion took between nine and fourteen months, and every one of them ran past the end of a working season.

1994

The committee review

A Commons committee asked whether automation had improved casualty response. It had not, measurably. What it had cut was the cost of keeping people on rocks in January.

1997

Solar and battery

Diesel generators came out of thirty-one stations. Fuel deliveries by sea fell from 118 a year to nine, which is the single largest saving in the whole programme.

1998

North Foreland

The last manned light was automated in November. The keepers’ logbooks went to the archive, which is where every date in this timeline comes from.

Before and after19811998

Manned stations910

Keepers employed2480

Fuel deliveries by sea, per year1189

Annual running cost£14.2m£3.1m

Lights in service9191

Keepers’ logbooks from 1812 to 1998 are held at the authority’s archive and may be consulted by appointment, free of charge.

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