Cyclone Gabrielle Update - Monday 6am
Published 13 February 2023
Overnight Cyclone Gabrielle’s winds have continued to hit the region hard. This is continuing to cause major damage to the Northpower network.
This is a significant event for the network and we have not seen this level of damage since Cyclone Bola in 1988. Currently, we have over 55 of our main high voltage lines damaged, covering around half of the network.
There are currently 18,500 households and businesses without power; this situation is changing rapidly and we expect more people could be impacted today. Those households affected by an outage will continue to be without power over the coming days and in some cases a week or more.
The below picture from our control room shows the extent of damage to our network at 6am this morning – all lines shown in white, yellow, or green are currently out of action.
Winds are still gusting up to 140 km/hr, and the forecast is showing more heavy rain and strong winds until Tuesday night. We are continuing to work to make sure things are safe, by isolating the electricity supply from the damaged lines. It is not safe or possible to begin to repair most of the issues until the wind abates.
We expect the weather situation to worsen over the next day or so, which will inevitably result in more outages.
We will be throwing everything at restoring power as quickly as we can. Some damage is going to require rebuilds which will take some time and we are beginning scoping and planning for this work now. All planned work for the week ahead has been canceled so we can move all of our staff behind the repair and recovery from this event.
We would like to thank the public and especially those without power for their patience and understanding as we work through this.
A quick reminder to please treat all lines and equipment as live at all times, please stay well clear of downed power lines and call us on 0800 10 40 40.
Outage information and the latest updates are shared regularly at the link below.
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