The hours-long outage disrupted trading for shops and restaurants, with one venue stating it led to “a night’s trading lost” just days out from Christmas.
Transpower has confirmed the lightning strike which caused the outage hit “close” to a tower on its 220kV Wairakei-Whirinaki power line.
That line runs near State Highway 5 Napier to Taupō Rd, and the location of the strike was about halfway between Napier and Taupō, about 20km north of the Harapaki wind farm.
The power outage began about 2.45pm for tens of thousands of properties and lasted until about 5pm for most customers.
“While our system is pretty robust, from time to time a lightning strike does take out a circuit - it’s impossible to protect against this,” a Transpower statement read.
“[On Saturday] we lost both circuits feeding the Hawke’s Bay at the same time due to lightning strikes.”
Many restaurants had just enough time to save their dinner bookings and trading when power was restored; however, some venues made the difficult decision to close for the night before the power was restored - to give themselves adequate time to notify staff and customers.
Napier RSA’s popular restaurant and club was one of the venues that closed amid the uncertainty.
A Napier RSA spokeswoman said a lightning strike was just “one of those things” but it was “a night’s trading lost” on what would have been a busy night.
“We had to make a call at some point because we did not know how long it was going to last,” she said.
Napier RSA is open every day but Christmas, and is hoping for a busy week of trading ahead.
The outage was caused by a lightning strike. Photo / NZME
Cool Toys owner Glen Chan said if the outage had happened two hours earlier it would have been much worse for his Napier business.
He said the shop was starting to taper down, in terms of the number of customers, when the power went out.
He said they were still able to trade in cash and a few bank transfers.
“There were a few cruise ship people that were asking if we could take foreign currency.”
He said unfortunately they could not do that these days, as it was hard to process with banks.
Some stores around Hawke’s Bay closed early as a result of the outage.
The Aidasol cruise ship, with capacity for more than 2000 passengers, was in Napier during the outage, having arrived at 11am. It left at 8pm.
Meanwhile, Hawke’s Bay Regional Council deployed a generator to its Haumoana pump station “to ensure continued service” during the power outage and wet weather.
The regional council was also on standby to deploy generators to other pump stations before the power was restored.
Gary Hamilton-Irvine is a Hawke’s Bay-based reporter who covers a range of news topics including business, councils, breaking news and cyclone recovery. He formerly worked at News Corp Australia.
