The teams made great progress yesterday and throughout the night getting more people connected. This morning we had 15,000 customers without power (about a quarter of our network), which was down from a peak of 30,000 on Tuesday morning.
Crews are out across the network with a focus on restoring power to key substation sites that power the lines to homes and businesses. Once power is restored to each substation site, crews will start to progressively work repairing faults down the lines. This means if you are at the end of a line, you may have longer outages.
There are still flooding and access issues that are causing problems, and this will hamper restoration in these areas.
Our key focus areas today have been:
We are acutely aware that many customers will have power out due to faults on the low voltage lines or equipment like pole or ground-mounted transformers and fuses that connect properties. Until the high voltage lines are livened, we often cannot identify these issues properly, but we will get to these after the high voltage restorations.
If power has been restored to your neighbourhood but you do not have power, please call our call centre on 0800 10 40 40 to ensure we know about your fault.
New information is available on northpower.com/status where you will find area of current issues and our current best estimate of how long power will be out for.
Our restoration priorities balance important welfare and critical infrastructure needs, including focussing on areas that have critical health service, critical infrastructure (including cellular sites), town centres to provide welfare services, rest homes, schools, and dairy farms (animal welfare).
Check your area statusIf you have damage to your service line (the line on your property) you may be able to get a contractor to help you. A list of approved contractors is available at northpower.com/gabrielle. If you have damage to your switchboard your electrician will be able to help.
Gabrielle updates