Power restored to Auckland after blackout

Thousands of homes, businesses and shops have been without power. Picture / Dean Purcell.

Power has been restored to most of Auckland after a blackout - thought to be caused by a storm sweeping the country - brought the city to a standstill.

More than 700,000 people were affected as power was cut to thousands of homes on top of the hundreds of businesses in the CBD forced to close.

Police described some of Auckland's intersections as "lunacy" as around 300 traffic lights went out just after 8.30am.

Power began to return to parts of the city from 12.40pm.

The city council activated its emergency operations centre and Auckland City Police mobilised its district emergency management plan, something not done since 1998's power crisis.

All but two of the city's police stations lost power and closed down.

A spokeswoman for power company Vector said the cause of the Auckland blackout was a fault on the Transpower network. She said: "An earth wire has snapped and fallen across the 110 kv feeder from the Otahuhu substation."

Transpower's Chris Roberts said 1000 megawatts of supply had been lost at a time on a winter's morning when close to 2000 megawatts would normally be used.

Transpower presumed the power failure was weather related but could not rule out a maintenance-related problem, he said.

He said the incident was a rare one which occurred at the worst possible spot.

"These sort of incidents are probably going to occur once every 50 years, so its a matter of how far do you go.

"With a power system you can make endless investment and you'll never ever get 100 per cent guarantee of supply so it's really a matter of judgment and the power system has never been planned to be able to cope with an event like this."

But Employers and Manufacturers Association (Northern) chief executive Alasdair Thompson said Transpower's response was not good enough.

"The half that was affected by area would have probably 80 per cent of Auckland within it, if not more," he said, adding that the weather was "pretty normal".

Mr Thompson estimated the incident would have cost about $70 million in gross domestic product.

At 2.45pm, Vector said power had been restored to most parts of Auckland except for Penrose, the Eastern Suburbs, Glen Innes, and Otahuhu.

Auckland mayor Dick Hubbard said questions had to be asked about why the CBD and 700,000 people should lose electricity through one section of power line going out.

"It would be appropriate to ask questions why and whether there is an unreasonable level of vulnerability," he said.

Middlemore and Auckland City hospitals cancelled all surgery and emergency departments were handling urgent cases only. North Shore and Waitakere Hospitals were not affected.

Dozens of people were trapped in lifts across the city, including nine in Westpac Towers in Albert Street between the 19-22 floors.

The Fire Service Communications Centre switched to MIPS - multiple incident procedures at about 9.15am to deal with a massive workload as fire alarms went off all over the city.

The blackout stopped trains on the Auckland network. Back-up systems came into operation and allowed limited services to operate, but one passenger, Jon Reeves, told nzherald.co.nz it took him two hours to get to work on a journey which usually takes 20 minutes.

A spokesman for Ontrack in Auckland said this morning: "We haven't been able to bring trains into Britomart station. Passengers have been discharged at Newmarket and the Strand and subsequent services have been scheduled to operate to and from there."

Cellphone coverage was also affected in Auckland.

Police asked people in Auckland to only contact them in emergencies as they were aware of the weather and power situation. They said some drivers were guilty of "lunacy" in the bad conditions, doing U-turns and driving the wrong way.

>> Your experiences of today's blackout

- HERALD STAFF, NZPA