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Northpower addresses Oakura fault, thanks locals

Published on February 7^th 2012, 4:03pm

Northpower crews have today repaired an electricity fault near Mokau which had affected almost 700 customers in the Helena Bay, Oakura and Bland Bay areas since 4.30am.

Power was restored to all customers by midday, some of whom had been subject to intermittent outages since Saturday, says Mr Dawson.

Due to the difficult terrain and the length of line, a helicopter was brought in to assist with the fault location. One of Northpower’s more experienced linesmen aboard the helicopter located the fault which would have been extremely difficult to spot quickly from the ground, says Mr Dawson.

Damage found on insulator and conductor indicates that it may possibly have been hit with a bullet. The location was near the road on the boundary of a forestry block.

“I appreciate that an outage like this is an inconvenience for people but I want to reassure those affected that we have had crews trying to locate the fault all weekend,” says Mr Dawson.

Intermittent faults involving insulators are often very hard to locate, he says.

“We were almost at the point of having to climb every pole along that section of line which would have been very time consuming due to the rough nature of the terrain. Once found, our ground crews completed the repair very quickly.

“We have done a huge amount of recent maintenance on the Helena Bay/Bland Bay line and there is more to come. In this case, there appears to be possible third party damage to the insulator – the pole and cross-arm were in very good condition.

“Every year we spend around $20 million on maintenance and asset replacement on the Northpower network. This compares to $1.25 million annually that we invest in fault response – so that shows how thorough we are in network maintenance and asset replacement. We put a huge effort into keeping faults to a minimum.

“Unfortunately, it does not matter how much maintenance we do, with the immense amount of electricity lines network we have throughout the Kaipara and Whangarei Districts – 5700km in total – we are always going to have to contend with outages.

“Nevertheless, we appreciate people bearing with us while this fault was sorted.”

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