Transpower, contractor sued for ‘avoidable’ tower collapse that cut Northland’s power
Thursday, 27 November 2025
The collapse of a transmission tower in Northland in June 2024, during routine maintenance, left thousands of the region’s households and businesses without power and cost it tens of millions of dollars - and now a class action is being filed against the companies involved to recoup some of those losses.
State-owned electricity grid operator Transpower and lines maintenance contractor Omexom have been served with notification of the class action. It is being run by Auckland law firm LeeSalmonLong and Australia’s Piper Alderman, and financed by Australian litigation funder Omni Bridgeway on a “no win, no pay” basis.
All affected Northland businesses are represented by the action, and pay nothing to be represented, but can “opt-out” if they wish to. The action could last up to three years.
The action doesn’t seek any penalties, but does aim to extract compensation for losses suffered by business who were unable to trade as result of the outage - already estimated by a report on the event as coming to at least $63.5 million, and by some counts, as much as $100m.
Hannah Brown, partner at Piper Alderman, told The Post most impacted businesses did not have the resources to fight for compensation, particularly on an individual basis.
“We think it’s important to ensure that entities who have committed clear acts of wrongdoing are held to account, particularly when they have the financial means to provide compensation.”
Asked who approached who to start the action, Brown said the incident attracted a significant amount of attention – “both at the time it occurred and again when relevant reports into the incident were published”. This prompted the legal teams running the class action to engage with affected businesses.
“This wasn’t just another power outage – it was the result of a significant failure of infrastructure management that could and should have been easily foreseen and avoided. We think that is the key point of distinction, in addition to the significant economic impact.”
How it happened
On the morning of June 20, 2024, a transmission tower (Tower 130) on an electricity line at the small rural community of Glorit in Northland fell to the ground, resulting in a significant power outage across nearly all of the region.
The nuts securing the tower to its base plate on at least two (of the four) legs were removed, causing the tower to lift off the base plate and fall.
Approximately 180,000 residents and 20,000 businesses were affected.
Power was completely cut and only partially restored by the evening on June 20. Many businesses were not fully restored to full power for two or three days (or longer in some cases) – so were not able to trade.
An independent review by the Electricity Authority concluded the collapse was caused by “entirely avoidable” factors, including Transpower’s inadequate procedures and deficient training, which had already been the subject of a prior internal warning by a senior engineer.
Transpower in particular was chastised in the report, with the authority finding the event demonstrated that “too much reliance was placed on service providers ensuring their own compliance with the contractual obligations and identified gaps in Transpower’s assurance processes”.
Transpower and Omexom contributed a $1 million to a regional resilience fund following the outage. But Far North mayor Moko Tepania said the funding was “hard fought and well received”, but paled in comparison to the significant losses experienced.
David Bullock, partner of LeeSalmonLong agreed, saying the collapse of the tower and the power outage that followed were “not the product of some uncontrollable event like a storm”. They were the result of a significant failure of infrastructure management that “should have been easily foreseen and avoided”.
Transpower told The Post that as the matter was now before the courts, it could not comment. Omexom did not respond to requests for comment.
A Town Hall will likely be held at a later date to hear more details, while Omni Bridgeway has asked anyone affected to get in touch to register their details.
Omni Bridgeway
ASX-listed Omni Bridgeway is a specialist class action shop and has funded several class actions in New Zealand previously. In August 2024 it took a case in the Wellington High Court on behalf of the New Zealand College of Midwives and about 1400 midwives. The claim alleged the Ministry of Health (among other things) breached a contract to provide “fair and reasonable” pay to midwives.
A judgement in the case is pending.
Omni Bridgeway also took a class action on behalf of failed insurer CBL Corporation shareholders in 2023. Around 53% of that $72.5 million settlement sum was paid to the participating shareholders, without an admission of liability by CBL.
An ongoing consumer class action against Johnson & Johnson (New Zealand) and other related entities, alleging oral cold and flu medication has contained an ineffective ingredient for about 20 years, was launched in early 2025 and remains ongoing.