KEY POINTS:
A 17-minute lunchtime powercut in the capital yesterday triggered ripples of effects that persisted through the afternoon.
Though the electricity was quickly restored, 17,000 Vector customers were without power for a time. Much of the central business district and some of the city's western suburbs were affected.
Traffic lights and shops in Lambton Quay and offices on The Terrace and Parliament Buildings were blacked out - and the Beehive executive building's emergency generators failed to kick in properly. Lights in the Beehive went out and then flickered back on briefly before going out again.
The Fire Service said it had callouts from people trapped in the blacked-out buildings, and elevator companies had numerous calls about people stuck in lifts.
At Parliament, Prime Minister Helen Clark asked why the Beehive's back-up generator failed. The regular Monday Cabinet meeting only avoided becoming the butt of jokes about being left in the dark because it started later than usual with senior ministers still meeting with the Prime Minister.
Helen Clark said the room where the Cabinet met had no windows: "So really it is not that amusing - the point of having a stand-by generator is for it to work ... questions are being asked."
The stand-by generator was meant to immediately kick in and restore all electrical services, but Helen Clark said she had been told there was a failure in the "load-shedding" system which is supposed to transfer the building load across to the generator.
An official later said that though the Beehive generator failed to work as expected, another back-up generator did come on line to supply the national Civil Defence emergency centre in the building's basement.
"We are checking into why the transition was not as smooth as we would have liked, but in an emergency, the Civil Defence centre would have kept operating and would have had the priority for power from that back-up."
- NZPA
