Around 500 customers in Northland are still without power after Cyclone Dovi battered the North Island over the weekend, Northpower says.
Downed trees and damaged power lines from Cyclone Dovi cut power to thousands of homes and businesses across the North Island on Sunday, including Wellington, Wairarapa, Manawatū, Taranaki, the Bay of Plenty, Auckland and Northland.
At its peak, around 50,000 customers across Auckland were briefly left without power as wind gusts reached over 150km/h, Vector said in a statement.
The number dropped down to 14,000. However, figures continued to change as crews "assess each area and are able to get a clearer picture of the extent of the damage".
Vector staff are working to restore power to customers in Auckland. (Source: Supplied)
"The volume of outages, and the location of some in rural areas that can be harder to access, means full restoration in some cases may take a few days," Vector general manager operations and maintenance, Marko Simunac, said.
“As we continue our work we ask the public to please stay well away from downed lines and call 111 if they see any."
Simunac said Covid-19 safety precautions means outages may "take longer than usual to resolve".
Further north, the wild weather caused widespread damage in Northland over the weekend, but was “better today” after the winds dropped, Northpower CEO Andrew McLeod told Breakfast.
“We got hit pretty hard yesterday. Saturday night, we got hit from the east coast, which did a lot of damage, and then it swung around Sunday morning onto the west coast.”
Northpower operates and maintains both electricity distribution and fibre networks in Whangārei and the Kaipara region, with more than 60,000 connected customers.
He said at its peak, there were 6000 customers without power.
“Worked really hard yesterday to get the power back on. Pleased to say we’re down to 500 customers out now so the teams have made really good progress. And they’ll be out there in force today putting everything back together.
Heavy rain saw soil and seemingly a car come down the hillside. (Source: 1News)
“We hope to have everyone back on – certainly most people back on – by the end of the day.”
McLeod said the “tricky thing” for the field teams on Sunday was the high winds.
“Typically, we’d have a storm come through, it’ll clear, teams can get out there and fix everything up but as fast as we could fix things, other things were breaking.”
He said Monday will be “much better” for the 150 staff working to restore power to customers.
“We should be able to get all over things today and just get everything back up again.”
Wild weather has generated a massive swell hitting the Taranaki coast. (Source: Supplied)
He said there were 10 large sites with “spans of power lines down, power poles down and a lot of pieces of trees everywhere”, and 200 smaller sites with more minor damage.
“It’s just all over the place so the crews have to cycle around, do these minor repairs and work through with everybody.
“By midday, we’ll probably have some of the bigger stuff starting to clear. It’ll take most of the day to pick off the smaller damage and some stuff may go into tomorrow but we’ll stay close to customers so they know what our plans are when things are happening and just get people on as quickly as we can.”
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