Cyclone winds have caused major damage to the Northpower network, much of it from trees falling through lines.
The below picture from our control room shows the extent of damage to our network at 9.30 pm tonight – all lines shown in white, yellow or green are currently out of action.
Our teams have been out in this weather restoring what they can but the priority today has been making everything safe, with wind gusts over 100km per hour it has not been safe or possible to repair all of the issues.
We currently we have around 22,500 customers without power.
If you are currently without power it is very likely you will be without power overnight, and possibly for several days.
We expect the weather situation to worsen over the next day or so which will inevitably result in more outages. Until this wind abates it is not safe to begin repairs.
Please be assured we will be doing all we can to restore power as quickly as we can when we can.