A number of suburbs are without power in the Western Bay and Tauranga regions this morning.
A SunLive reader has messaged us on Facebook to says there was a loud bang in the Brookfield area around 4.30am.
"Now power is low and dodgy."
Powerco is reporting outages in Pukehina, Te Puke, Brookfield and Ohauiti.
Damaged equipment is being blamed for a power outage in Brookfield, which is affecting 779 properties.
No cause has been listed for the power cut affecting 226 properties in Ohauiti and the additional 215 properties in Brookfield.
Powerco says a vehicle hitting a power pole is the cause of the outage in Te Puke and Pukehina.
There are multiple power outages in the region.
1 comment
It's like a 3rd world country...
Posted on 18-02-2021 14:22 | By morepork
The whole point of a "network" is that if a node goes down, service can be re-routed through other nodes. We don't seem to have any "other nodes" or alternate routing... A car hitting a lamp post, or a transformer struck by lightning, is NOT an unforeseeable event. It shouldn't result in thousands of people being plunged into darkness. The networks should be designed to ensure that the bare minimum of people are disadvantaged if a node goes down, rather than a whole community. Communities should have more than one node available to them. The inescapable conclusion is that either our reticulation has been very poorly designed, or it has been drastically under-invested in. Either way, power distributors should be held to account and legally obliged to remedy the situation.
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