Curra Community Club left with $5000 bill after power cut
Interrupted power supplies in a booming region are getting steadily worse, with brownouts and blackouts occurring almost daily, storms or not and local residents and businesses are demanding action.
Gympie
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A regional community club wants answers after a power cut blew their transmitter and exhaust fan, leaving them with $5000 damage in a string of worsening brownouts and blackouts in a major growth suburb.
Curra Community Club committee member and manager Rachel Butler sits at the patio out the back of the club, a 15-minute drive on the Bruce Hwy north of Gympie - in front of her is a fuse box and letters from her electrician and Ergon Energy.
She is no stranger to the decades-long problem of power cuts at Curra, and the club is a disaster recovery centre when the power goes out, which is regularly.
The generator is set up to automatically kick in and the club fills with locals waiting out the power outage with a cold beer, a shower and air conditioning.
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Ms Butler said she thought the club was coping fine, but since October 2023, an increase in brownouts meant constant resetting of eftpos machines, and signing back into systems as they all turn off and then back on suddenly.
“You can actually hear when there’s too much load on the system that fan slows down,” she said, and pointed to a wall fan in the corner of the patio.
“You can hear it, it’s a warning, it’s like there is too much power on the system and it just slows down.”
On October 22, 2023 a controller box plus a $5000 kitchen exhaust fan blew, and with an electrician’s report stating it was due to a brownout, Ms Butler asked for compensation from Ergon Energy.
On January 8, 2024 she received notice the request was declined.
“Ergon’s view is that they are not liable for any damages sustained as a result of the incident that occurred on the 22nd,” she read from the notice.
What baffles her, she said, is that “they haven’t come out to inspect it”.
Her situation only adds to the increasing frustration many of the residents feel with power cuts, both brownouts and blackouts as a petition by stay-at-home mum Celeste Rigby for reliable electricity reaches more than 600 signatures.
Curra residents and club patrons Gary, Nicky, Eric, Russell and Bushy, who were enjoying a drink and a smoke on the patio, quickly grew bored of the conversation over power cuts and said it was “part of living in the country” and you had to “harden up” and deal with it.
But they all agreed brownouts, with flickering lights, or complete blackouts had definitely become a weekly occurrence since October, and a lot of them seemed unrelated to storm activity.
Joan Williams, another Curra resident and coffee merchandiser, said she felt like the suburb had just been “forgotten”, was tired of “paying increasing maintenance fees” for power cuts that were becoming a “daily part of life” in the area.
Ergon Energy said they “were unable to comment on matters raised by individual customers due to privacy legislation”.
A statement from the electricity company last week said an electricity distribution network upgrade had been launched in the Curra region and is scheduled to be completed by mid-2024.
“The proposed project is aimed at improving the electricity supply reliability in the Curra region by adding an alternative feeder to the area while increasing network capacity in the area,” it said.
Ergon Energy said there had been five unplanned network outages throughout Curra in December due to storm activities and other power outages from “other weather impacts”.
On December 28, Celeste Rigby launched a petition that has so far garnered 615 signatures to demand reliable electricity supply in Curra and surrounds.
Click here to sign the petition.
If you have also experienced black or brown outs in Curra and would like to share your story, email christine.schindler@news.com.au
Ergon Energy listed the outages in Curra due to storm activity throughout December as:
15/12/2023 from 17:20 to 18:40
16/12/2023 from 18:10 to 23:30
17/12/2023 from 16:00 to 17:10
19/12/2023 from 18:20 to 19:30
Outage that impacted a small area of Curra:
29/12/2023 from 18:10 to 19:20
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Originally published as Curra Community Club left with $5000 bill after power cut
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