Cyclone Gabrielle: Substation likely underwater, power out in Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne, stretches of Auckland

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Transpower said it has been able to restore some power to parts of Hawkes Bay and Gisborne following the outage this morning resulting from the cyclone Gabrielle.

The restored power is not sufficient to power the whole of both regions, and the ability of local lines companies Unison Networks and Eastland Network to restore power to end users depends on the extent of damage to local networks, Transpower said.

“Transpower does not have full visibility of that at this stage and communication with the local lines companies is limited because of the disruption to communication systems,” the national grid operators said.

Transpower has bypassed its flooded Redclyffe substation to supply Unison Networks from its Fernhill substation. Unison is taking around 17 megawatts of electricity from the substation, enough to power around 17,000 households.

Eastland Network has been able to take around 10 MW from Genesis’ Tuai generator to supply parts of Gisborne and Wairoa. This is enough to supply around 10,000 houses.

It could take days or weeks to fully restore power, Transpower said.

Transpower has declared a grid emergency and has a helicopter on standby to investigate the scale of damage.

The outage happened because of flooding at the Redclyffe substation during the extreme weather.

The substation is near Otatara Pā Historic Reserve, southwest of Taradale.

Homes are underwater near the Esk River Bridge. Photo / Supplied

In Auckland, lines company Vector’s outage map showed swathes of the region were without power this afternoon.

Piha has lost power and was cut off by slips.

The Vector map indicated most of west and northwest Auckland had unplanned outages. So did eastern parts of Waiheke, and parts of Whangaparāoa.

On the North Shore, unplanned outages in Windsor Park and Castor Bay were also reported.

In the southeast, some rural and semi-rural areas around Brookby, Clevedon and Whitford were without power this afternoon.