A fortunate happenstance this week has provided a boon for North Canterbury lines company, MainPower, as it brings in line crews from around the country who have been in town for the Annual Connection Lineman competition.
Acting Chief Executive Damien Whiffen says having the extra crews on hand will mean more poles going up this weekend, a key move to restore power to the 1,057 customers still out following this week’s weather event.
“Our assessment activities over the last couple of days indicate we’ve got more than 100 poles down across the network. We’re incredibly grateful these guys have offered to stick around following this week’s competition, and it gives us a much-needed boost to get the lines back up across the network.”
With more than 5,000 kilometres of lines and cables spanning over 56,000 power poles, the company has around 40 poles down in the Leslie Hills area alone.
Around 70 field staff will be on the ground today affecting repairs following the successful re-livening of most of Hanmer and other pockets across the network yesterday.
“We’ve restored power to more than 4,000 customers around the region over the last two days. We’ve got just over 1,000 left to restore, but these remaining outages are generally due to significant damage in hard-to-reach places. There’s a lot of work to do over the next few days.
“There are some places, like the Waiau River and the Hurunui River mouth that have experienced significant damage in areas that will take us some days to get to. Customers in those areas can expect to be without power until around the middle of next week. We are keeping our website and outage maps up to date constantly, and we’re including estimated repair times for most jobs.”
MainPower has more than 46,000 customers across the network which spans over 11,000 kilometres.
“We’ve got plenty of stock and some of the best crews in the country – it’s going to take some time to get around to the repairs, but we’ve got some great people planning, preparing and repairing. We’ll get power back on for our customers as soon as we safely can.”
