Power restored to thousands of Tauranga customers

35,000 customers were affected by the power outage. Photo / File

By RNZ

Lines crews took untill the early morning to get power back to thousands of properties in Tauranga, plunged into darkness late last night.

The National grid operator, Transpower, says it was a fault at a substation, and it took some time to get all customers back online.

Thirty-five thousand properties were affected by the outage.

Last night, Transpower's principal adviser for stakeholders Geoff Wishart said crews were working to get people connected again.

"We seem to have lost supply to the Tauranga CBD and surrounding areas around about 9.45 this evening.

"Very many apologies to those people, consumers, who are without power at the moment.

"Our crews have only just got to site so they're investigating equipment and hopefully they'll be able to find the fault and get people back on as soon as possible."

Wishart said once the problem was fixed it could take some time for power to be restored as it has to return in a checked and measured manner.

According to the website of the lines company Powerco, an outage at 9.40pm affected up to 32,000 properties.

An outage an hour earlier cut power to another 10,000 plus properties.

Power was not expected to be restored until between 1.30am and 1.45am although some people told RNZ their power had come back on.

Power was also out to 74 properties in Whanganui, and was due to be restored by around the same time although some reported their power was restored earlier.

Powerco said trees on lines caused one outage, while the cause of another was a substation fault.