A LAST-MINUTE notification of a power outage on the Far South Coast caused concerns beyond just the disruption.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
A BDN reader who relies of life-support equipment at home said Essential Energy usually notifies her and others in similar situations of any proposed disruptions to their power supply.
However, that didn’t happen on Friday.
Essential Energy sent media outlets an urgent alert of the power outage just before 2pm on Friday, stating power to around 16,000 customers would be cut between 1-3am on Saturday morning.
Customers in Bega and further south were affected, including the towns of Tathra, Tura Beach, Merimbula, Pambula, and Eden.
Essential Energy said it facilitated the power supply interruption in the early hours of Saturday to enable TransGrid to conduct urgent repairs to network protection equipment at its Cooma zone substation.
TransGrid owns and manages the high voltage transmission network in NSW, which transmits power from electricity generators to electricity distributors including Essential Energy.
“The repairs were required to ensure the ongoing safe, reliable and efficient supply of electricity to
the Bega Valley,” Essential’s South-East regional manager, Phillip Green, said
“While the National Energy Customer Framework does not require electricity distributors to notify customers of fault and emergency work, Essential Energy used various communication channels to inform the local community of the interruption after receiving the outage notification from TransGrid on Friday, February 13.
“A statement to relevant local media outlets was issued at 1.45pm and published on websites, and an alert was posted on Essential Energy’s Facebook page about 3pm,” Mr Green said.
The BDN reader said she knew of people in worse situations than hers, but said there should have been ample time for Essential to contact customers, including her, who are vulnerable to cuts in power to their medical equipment.
Meanwhile, without the power of social media, the power cut could also have caused significant headaches for the Bega Valley Medical Practice.
Practice manager Jodie Meaker said she wasn’t in the area over the weekend, but a nurse who works there leapt into action when her daughter saw the alert on Facebook.
“She came in at 1am and set up a generator for our vaccine fridge – it’s temperature controlled and we could have lost the lot,” Ms Meaker said.
“Hundreds of dollars’ worth” of vaccines were stored in the fridge, Ms Meaker said.
“The nurse said she only knew about it because her daughter saw it on Facebook.”
Ms Meaker said if Essential didn’t have time to notify all medical centres or even individuals, as would normally be the case with planned outages, it would only have taken a phone call to the BVMP for the team to be able to spread the word to their more vulnerable clients.
“Yes we do [have patients needing life-support equipment] - it would just have been a matter of brainstorming who we could call,” Ms Meaker said.
“But there was nothing.”
At Bega Hospital, emergency backup power “worked flawlessly”, Bega Valley Health Service general manager Heather Austin said.
“There was insufficient notice [of the outage], but the generator kicked in and all worked like clockwork,” Ms Austin said.
