Crews fix powerlines causing outage for hundreds of customers

Kuranda residents have had their power restored after broken powerlines caused hundreds to be without power since Sunday morning.

Kate Stephenson

less than 2 min read

September 11, 2023 - 12:56PM

The Cairns Post

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Power has now been restored to hundreds of Kuranda residents who were left in the dark since early Sunday morning thanks to a fallen tree.

Power to 418 Ergon Energy customers from Kowrowa, Kuranda, Mantaka, Myola, Oak Forest and Russet Park was cut off at 3.15am on Sunday morning.

Ergon Energy ground crews spent all of Sunday working to locate the fault which was found to be 500 metres of broken overhead powerline brought down by a large fallen tree.

The area surrounding the fault was heavily vegetated and had limited access and so ground crews made the decision to delay work until first light on Monday morning.

Ergon Energy spokeswoman Emma Oliveri said the although workers regularly perform maintenance on their grid, the size of the fallen tree meant this outage could not have been prevented.

“Ergon has a robust vegetation management program and trees are trimmed along the powerline corridor, but this outage was caused by a large tree falling from outside the corridor,” she said.

“In an area renowned for its beautiful rainforests, we need to strike a balance when it comes to vegetation management.”

Vegetation management crews were in the area as recently as April.

Despite rumours power would not be restored until Tuesday, Ms Oliveri confirmed power had been restored to all 418 customers at 12:45pm on Monday.

Ms Oliveri advised customers to prepare for the upcoming storm season where risks of prolonged power outages increases.

“Our crews are on-call for emergencies 24/7, but it takes time to find and fix faults, especially in difficult terrain.”

Streets and roads affected include: