Power outage by Cyclone Gabrielle the largest since Cyclone Bola
Tuesday, 14 February 2023
Power could be out in eastern parts of the North Island for weeks after cyclone Gabrielle left a trail of destruction.
Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti were left without power for most of Tuesday after they with battered with gale force winds and heavy rains. Despite it had been restored to some parts of the region late afternoon, Transpower warned the outage could last for “days to weeks, rather than hours”.
About 45,000 people had been left without power in Hawke’s Bay, said Energy Minister Megan Woods on Tuesday. Tairāwhiti Civil Defence Controller Ben Green said Eastland Network had provided some coastal townships with power generators.
Transpower said the outage was caused by flooding to the Redclyffe substation in Napier’s Taradale and had declared a “grid emergency”. The substation normally supplies power to local lines companies to distribute electricity to Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti.
**READ MORE:
* Thousands of homes in North Island likely to remain without power overnight
* First progress made restoring power to Gisborne and Hawke's Bay
**
The company had been able to supply Unison Networks in Hawke’s Bay enough electricity for 17,000 homes by redirecting power through a different substation in Fernhill. It also re-routed electricity from Genesis’ Tuai hydroelectric power station on Lake Waikaremoana to supply Eastland Network in Gisborne with enough power for 10,000 homes.
Woods also said 225,000 people across the country lost power – the largest disruption to electricity infrastructure since cyclone Bola in 1988.
Woods said the substation was unaccessible by engineers at the moment.
“We've got to wait till it's safe for people to get in there to assess what the repairs have to be,” she said. “We understand that this is an incredibly difficult thing for those households that are going through that. But what I'm reassured that everything that can be done is being done, and it will be done as quickly as it can be.”
Transpower’s chief executive Alison Andrew told RNZ’sCheckpoint on Tuesday evening the company planned to have a helicopter to fly over the substation to survey the damage earlier that day but it was rescheduled for Wednesday morning because of heavy winds.
Andrew also said she didn’t have a timeframe on when power would be fully restored until engineers had inspected the substation.
“We’re working closely to bring as much up as soon as we can,” she said.
The power outage also knocked out communications to Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti, leaving the area without phone and Internet coverage for most of Tuesday. Email was restored in the afternoon for Hawke’s Bay, but phone calls remained patchy.
Telecommunications Forum chief executive Paul Brislen said on Tuesday evening that Spark, 2degrees and Vodafone had brought in 40 diesel generators to keep some of their cellsites running.
At least two fibre-optic cables in the area had been damaged by the storm. Chorus Spokesperson Steve Pettigrew said it typically took a few hours to mend the cables, but its technicians were unable to safely access the site of the breaks to conduct repairs.
The storm had left Gisborne as a bit of a ghost town, with nothing open and local wandering about watching activity of contractors, police and emergency service staff. About 400 people had to be evacuated over all the region. So far a couple of houses have been red-stickered and just over a dozen yellow-stickered.
Residents have also been told to conserve water immediately or taps will run dry. The mains supply of water has been broken in several places and there is no immediate back up. The council was looking at options for bringing in water.