Crews scramble to keep power on

Wild weather in Dannevirke caused power companies to fight to keep power on.

Severe winds on Monday had Scanpower line crews scrambling to keep power connected throughout the district.

However, the major outage which saw Dannevirke in lock-down was a Transpower issue, Scanpower's network operations controller Warren Harris said.

"We have two circuits which feed Dannevirke and with the high winds Transpower had issues with one of those and then the second circuit also had problems," he said.

"Unfortunately you can't live with two circuits out and so Transpower declared a grid emergency and worked to feed a new circuit into town."

Geoff Wishart, Transpower's acting communications manager, said the problem with the circuits in the wild weather affected both Dannevirke and Waipawa, but despite the galeforce winds the network had stood up well.

Mr Harris said through Monday night Scanpower continued to have short outages, with the main problems from Top Grass Rd north to Ellison Rd in Norsewood.

"We also had a couple of big trees through lines, including in Princess St in Dannevirke, but when you consider we recorded constant winds of 100km/h out here at Oringi and gusts up to 140km/h, we did well.

"It was a marathon effort by our lads," Mr Harris said.

Mr Harris said yesterday morning there were still a couple of very remote sites where power needed to be restored.

"The wind is a huge issue for us because everything we do is eight metres up in the air," he said.

However, Mr Harris said the high winds were a reminder for residents and farmers to prune trees to keep them away from lines. "There was a lot of tree damage and a couple of stock deaths."