The flooded Redclyffe substation, responsible for much of Napier and Hawke’s Bay’s power outage. Photo / Warren Buckland
The flooded Redclyffe substation, responsible for much of Napier and Hawke’s Bay’s power outage. Photo / Warren Buckland
Thousands of homes remain without power across the North Island as power companies race to get the lights back on again.
As of 11am, Vector said around 2000 homes and businesses remain without power in the Auckland region, following widespread and significant damage from Cyclone Gabrielle.
This number excludes customers in the West Coast beaches of Piha, Bethells, and Muriwai, as in some cases there is still significant damage that will take considerable time to repair.
”We have responded to a request from Auckland Emergency Management to provide power wherever possible in these areas, and will continue to make repairs if feasible, however much of the remaining work is extremely complex and challenging,” said a spokesperson.
”We’ve brought more crews in from outside our network area, where spare capacity was available at other electricity distribution businesses and taking into account the needs of other parts of the North Island. These additional crews will mean we can get through more work faster, and will also help us manage fatigue and health and safety concerns amongst all crews.”
Work is still ongoing in Opononi, Towai, Rangiahua, Kohukohu and Panguru.
“We have been getting queries from some customers concerned their power is not on, but their neighbours have been restored. Or that their power has come on to then go off again. During restoration we need to sometimes de-energise an area to make it safe for the crews to complete their repairs on other parts of that line.”
People looking to enter Rissington and Patoka must cross the river by boat. Photo / Mike Scott
Power to more than 5000 Hawke’s Bay Unison customers was restored overnight, the company said.
”We’ve restored power to 73 per cent of customers in Napier and 95 per cent in Hastings.”
The company said yesterday it completed the rebuild of the Tutaekuri River crossing which was washed away by flooding near Brookfields Rd.
”Now it’s completed, we have a second line from Hastings to Napier increasing the amount of electricity supplying Napier,” it said in a social media post.
The company said this job would usually take three months to complete but was finished in one weekend.
”Two emergency supplies into Transpower NZ’s Redclyffe substation, which is crucial for continuing restoration of Napier, will be completed early this week, enabling Unison to continue to restore power to more areas of Napier, and begin to return supply to outlying areas.”
Unison said reconnections in rural areas will take longer and in some cases a number of weeks due the the “significant damage”.
”We’ve completed an initial assessment of the backbone of our rural network by helicopter and have identified key sites for repair to specific rural communities first and foremost. Crews will be heading out to these sites where they can access as soon as possible.”
Northpower said its crews had been working long days to reconstruct the network.
“We are now down to 850 customers without power due to high-voltage faults and have over 1000 faults in our system on the low-voltage network.”
The company said low-voltage faults are affecting small communities as well as individuals and its teams are working tirelessly to fix these.
Counties Energy said all of its network has been restored from the damage caused by Cyclone Gabrielle, except for one outage affecting a property in Pukekawa.
“This is a complex rebuild and we are waiting on materials. The region has been affected by more than 1,000 individual faults with 12,500 properties without power across the cyclone period - around one quarter of our network.
”We have some Counties Energy crews enroute to the Northland area currently to assist with restoring power to their community.”
