There have been numerous power outages this year and Lane Cove West and Riverview residents were impacted last night. Ausgrid has advised that a bat flew into the powerlines and met a nasty end. This resulted in over 1000 customers losing power.
We asked Ausgrid why there had been so many power outages since January 2017 and are they connected?
Ausgrid checked their records and advised that although the outages occurred within a short time period the causes were unrelated.
No cause was found for the January 1 outage. However, the outage on January 11 was caused by wildlife touching terminals on one of their transformers. This event affected 5,000 customers. Another outage on 8th March was caused by a flying fox coming into contact with overhead wires.
There was an unrelated outage on Mar 16 for 3,600 customers in the Lane Cove area, which was caused by a fault on an underground cable which was repaired within 4 hours.
An outage on Mar 17 was caused by a tree branch falling on overhead powerlines during high winds.
Almost half of all outages on the Ausgrid network are caused by external factors such as trees and branches falling on powerlines, lightning strikes and wind damage during storms, wildlife contacting powerlines, cars hitting power poles and vandalism of equipment. Leafy Lane Cove is well known to have power issues relating to nature.
If you have lost power or want to check if there is a power outage, you can check the Ausgrid site. Also make sure you let ITC know as you can see we are keeping track.
Do you have a local issue you would like help with? ITC is here to help just email us at [email protected]
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