Invercargill residents and busineses found themselves in the dark again today, with the fifth powercut in as little as eight weeks affecting parts of the inner-city.
According to PowerNet Chief Executive Jason Franklin, a power outage at 7:54am on Wednesday, July 24, resulted in a loss of power in the CBD and Bond and Mersey Streets. Over 750 customers on the Electricity Invercargill Limited’s network were affected which was caused by a failed connection on the network’s equipment.
By 11.45am, the majority of customers’ power was restored, with the final five customers reconnected before 1pm.
The string of outages started on Thursday, May 30 at 8:08pm when hundreds of residents were left in darkness for at least 35 minutes. Stadium Southland was closed till late Friday after the outage due to equipment failure. Other outages occurred on June 23, July 9, 19, and 24.
Franklin says at this point, they believe each outage has been caused by an individual fault and are “not related to one another”.
In a press release, he stated that they are aware of the importance of power supply and apologise for the inconvenience.
“The safety and well-being of our employees and the community are our first priorities when working on restoring electricity to the networks we manage.”
While multiple power outages in the CBD and surrounding areas can cause some disruption, it’s the communication regarding them that has some Invercargill residents and businesses incensed. According to What’s On Invers, Powernet did not update media and customers about the Thursday, May 30 powercut until 1pm the next day.