Sunday night’s storm saw Wellington hit with the strongest winds (193kph) since 2013. While the network held up well, winds of this strength damaged vegetation as trees fell across lines or branches were blown into feeders resulting in widespread damage across the network.

Safety is our number one priority and Sunday night’s hazardous conditions continued through much of Monday limiting restoration efforts at height until Tuesday.  Once the winds died down, our restoration efforts were slowed by challenging access and site conditions, and multiple complex secondary faults that required pole replacements and extensive vegetation removal.

Because we initially expected to restore all customers’ power today, we’ll be donating $10 for every job remaining on Saturday to KidsCan Charitable Trust

How many faults have we responded to?

• Since Sunday night, we’ve restored power to approximately 21,000 customers, managing safety with regular check ins and roster rotations to manage fatigue
• We’ve fixed more than 60 area faults, including 36 high voltage feeders that were damaged 
• We’ve fixed more than 1000 single-property faults. We currently have approximately 700  single-property faults left to restore 
• We’ve also responded to more than 500 calls about damaged lines or lines down. While many of these are telecommunications lines, we send a crew to investigate each one. 

Why do single-property faults take longer to restore?
While we were able to restore the vast majority of area outages within two days, we were left with a long tail of single-property outages. Single-property outages are usually caused by localised damage, such as a fault on the line serving just one home.

Because our crews prioritise repairs that restore power to the largest number of customers first, these smaller, harder-to-locate faults are typically repaired last. These faults need to be repaired one at a time, property-by-property, which is always a slow process.  We’re also not always able to immediately identify these faults, as some may be initially hidden by larger area outages. Some of these jobs have also been complex, requiring follow visits which has affected our original timeline.

To get everyone’s power back on as soon as possible we've cancelled all planned work and devoted all available resources to restoring single-property faults, with our crews working into the early hours of the morning. We’ve also brought in multiple additional crews from outside the region. 

We’d like to apologise to everyone who has experienced disruption due to a power outage, and thank our customers for their continued patience.