Kāwhia power restored after tree falls, damaging 14 poles and lines

Repaired power poles in Ōpārau after a tree brought down 14.

Parts of the Ōpārau community near Kāwhia woke to no power last week, after a large tree fell and brought down 14 power poles across 1.3km of rural land.

Waipā Networks faults and events manager Eric Everiss said the weight and way the tree fell caused significant network damage, making restoring power particularly challenging.

“While we do get trees falling onto powerlines occasionally, it doesn’t usually cause multiple lines to fall like this one did. The way this tree fell, unfortunately, caused a flow-on effect impacting the surrounding network,” Everiss said.

The team reacted quickly to assess the damage and undertake repairs, which included the full replacement of 12 poles, and repair of 3km of powerlines, and 11kV high voltage equipment.

A large tree fell in Ōpārau last week bringing down 14 power poles.

Given the extended duration of the outage, general manager of customer and community Anna Greenhill said she was thankful for the community’s understanding while the team worked to get the power back on.

“Based on our assessment, we knew restoration would take several days to complete, so the team acted quickly bringing in generators to minimise the time customers were without power while we undertook repairs,” Greenhill said.

Waipā Networks teams on the ground and in the office checked in regularly with impacted customers, visiting them at home and calling at least once a day until their power was restored.

“We also had a team delivering care packages with essential food items because of the duration of the outage,” Greenhill said.

“Our focus was on ensuring that those impacted were supported and I’d like to thank our community for their patience while we restored their power supply.”