Hundreds of Gold Coasters affected by Southport power outage

Gold Coasters have been plunged into darkness after almost 1000 homes lost power. Find out what caused the outage.

Just under 1000 Gold Coast homes were impacted by a power outage on Thursday morning. Picture: File/Glenn Hampson

Gold Coasters have been plunged into darkness after almost 1000 homes lost power in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The blackout was caused by an incident at Bambarra St in Southport at around 2.50am on Thursday.

Energex spokesman Danny Donald confirmed a surge arrest had failed, causing an outage to 999 customers.

Mr Donald said the role of a surge arrester was to absorb the impact of things like lightning strikes.

Mr Donald said by 4.45am, half of the affected homes were back online.

At 8am, more than 100 homes were still without power, though crews were working to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

“Sometimes they (surge arresters) just give up the ghost, as we all would, after a few lightning strikes,” Mr Donald said.

He said the surge arrester would have done some heavy lifting in its time, “particularly in the wake of the cyclone and the storms we have had.”

There are two other unrelated outages at Guanaba and Maudsland, affecting a total of 21 customers.

Originally published as Hundreds of Gold Coasters affected by Southport power outage