A power outage was not enough to stop Santa from arriving at the Raetihi Christmas Parade on Saturday and organiser Alison Hope said it was about the best parade she could remember in the town.
Transpower's senior communications adviser Trudy Shannon said the outage occurred on Friday night and staff were working to restore power to Raetihi and along the Whanganui River on Saturday.
"Unfortunately staff were unable to identify the cause of the outage and were still investigating and testing the system on Saturday," she said. "We apologise to those affected by the outage for the inconvenience."
Ms Shannon was able to confirm last night that the fault had been identified and fixed, however the return to service was expected to cause a 30-minute outage in Ohakune, Raetihi and surrounding areas.