Lower Hutt residents hired expensive generators and stopped flushing their toilets to survive a “nightmare” five-day power outage caused by extreme weather.
On Sunday night, Wellington experienced the strongest winds on record since 2013.
They caused widespread damage to power networks, affecting 21,000 customers, according to Wellington Electricity.
While the company said it had restored power to most of these customers, Lower Hutt residents told the Herald they had struggled without power for days.
Tarsh, who did not want her last name to be used, said she and her neighbours have not had power since 4pm on Sunday.
She has resorted to hiring a generator, which she switches on intermittently to charge phones, run the washing machine and dishwasher and take showers.
Tarsh said that because she works as a nurse, she needs to be able to shower and clean her uniform regularly.
“The generator has a daily charge and is expensive,” she said.
The generator hire cost her $93 per day. She also had to pay for petrol separately, which amounted to a total of $587 so far.
She said her family lost the food stocked in their freezers and, while the generator was being used to try to keep the fridge cold, the food in there was still going off too.
At one point, Tarsh recalled standing in the wind, cooking toast outside on the barbecue to feed her son so he could eat breakfast before going to daycare.
As of today, she still did not have lights in her house and had run out of candles.
“It has been a nightmare.”
Despite contacting Wellington Electricity most days to get updates, she said she could not get any estimated time of repair from the company.
“That’s the annoying thing, because we would have looked at other options, like staying elsewhere, if we knew it would be this long,” Tarsh said.
The most recent message Wellington Electricity sent Tarsh stated crews would be working to restore her power by Saturday.
The message also mentioned the company would donate “$10 for every job remaining on Saturday to KidsCan Charitable Trust”.
Tarsh said donating to charity would not help people like her. “They should be giving it back to those forking out extra [money] to be able to continue day-to-day”.
Korokoro resident Mark Roughton said his and 30 other houses in his neighbourhood did not have power from Sunday night to Thursday night.
During those four days, he cooked on a gas camping stove and used a generator to keep his freezer going.
The outage forced him to cut down on using his toilet so that his septic tank would not overflow.
The tank depended on an electric pump to drain the liquid, but it required 220 volts to work.
The day his power was restored, he told the Herald, he had been “two flushes away” from having a sanitation disaster on his hands.
Two days into the Korokoro power outage, Roughton said, his community technically had its power turned back on, but it bounced between 90 and 130 volts.
He said an electrician advised people in his neighbourhood to turn off their mains because operating appliances on a low voltage would cause them to pull more current than necessary, which could break them.
But he said he received the opposite advice from Wellington Electricity, which encouraged him and his neighbours to turn their mains on.
Roughton said what frustrated him the most was not the outage itself but the lack of consistent and “proactive” communication from Wellington Electricity.
He said he was very grateful to the workers who were repairing the power lines, but the way Wellington Electricity handled his local outage left him with no confidence that it could cope with larger outages that might happen in the future.
“If this happens again, under the present circumstances, they’d be snowed.”
Wellington Electricity told the Herald in a statement that there were two main reasons for the delays in restoring power.
“For some areas’ outages our crews have encountered complex secondary faults and access issues.
“We have also been left with a large number of single-property faults which need to be repaired one at a time, property-by-property.”
The company said it regularly updated its website banner with the latest information about outages and had launched a new map that showed estimated restoration times for single-property faults.
“We have also been regularly contacting customers by text or phone who’ve reported to confirm their status so we can move our crews to safely restore power to them as quickly as possible.”
When asked about the outage in Korokoro, the company told the Herald multiple issues had occurred with restoring the power to that area, including broken wires and power trips.
Wellington Electricity said low voltage could often occur when one of the electrical supply wires breaks, but it should be within an acceptable limit before making a connection.
Janhavi Gosavi is a Wellington-based journalist for the New Zealand Herald who covers news in the capital.