Power restored to hundreds in Ōwhata, Rotorua after day-long outage

Scene of the crash on Vaughan Rd. Photo / Andrew Warner

A power outage that impacted almost 600 people in the Ōwhata area after a crash this morning appears to be over.

Unison's website no longer reported the outage as active.

Originally, the incident left 599 Unison power customers without electricity from 9.57am, with power not estimated to be back on until 5pm.

According to the Unison website at 5.40pm, power had been partially restored but was still out to 488 customers.

Unison relationship manager Danny Gough said repairs should be complete and all customers restored within the next hour.

Gough earlier told the Rotorua Daily Post the major incident was due to a car crashing into a power pole this morning on Vaughan Rd.

"It's Murphy's law that it's a very big part of our network that supplies a large number of customers. It's a concrete pole that supports several circuits of ours.

"Because they are quite significant repairs we have to do it's going to take our guys approximately five hours to get those repairs completed and power restored fully."

Gough said generators were being established to bring power back to some of the customers in the area.

"As we go through that process it may affect some other customers as we go through what we call switching to sort of switch in and out where we connect the generator in.

"It is quite a major, unfortunately."

He said power outages as a result of the switching would be for a short period of time.

A police spokeswoman confirmed powerlines were down in the Ōwhata area following a single-vehicle crash about 9.09am.

She said the crash happened at the intersection of Vaughan Rd and Tennyson Dr.

There were no reports of injuries.

St John did not attend, a spokesman confirmed.