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As someone who hooks up nightly to a CPAP life-saving machine while I sleep, I really feel for the many electricity consumers in our area who have varied medial needs relying on life-support equipment running on electricity.
That is until we experience an unexpected power blackout as happened on Saturday around 1am.
Fortunately I was awoken to the sound of my machine winding down indicating loss of power, then silence and the house in darkness.
I attempted to ring on my fixed landline to report the outage, but the phone was dead.
It had been working earlier on Friday night and was maybe a coincidence that it was operational after the power resumed.
I had a mobile with limited reception, but held off reporting the outage on this occasion.
It was puzzling to find out over the weekend that our local media had been alerted as early as 1.45pm Friday.
While I understood they took steps to put it up on their websites, communication was limited to only anyone who happened to check those websites.
My concerns, I took up to Origin, my energy provider, and was then told to phone Essential Energy.
The receptionist I spoke to said 16,000 residents were affected by these urgent repairs carried out by Transgrid and due to time constraints they were unable to notify consumers.
The question I asked on Monday – and am still awaiting them to call back – was if they were aware of the need to close all electricity down 11 hours later, following alerting the media did they attempt to phone any of the people on their life- support register?
The register they keep lists all the phone contact numbers and so on and would have advised those people an outage would occur so alternative arrangements could be set up.
As the days pass, it is now becoming apparent this power outage did indeed impact considerably on more than just life-support people in our community.
On this occasion our energy providers did indeed let this community down.
Hopefully they can learn something from this interruption on our service.
PS May I add their advance notification of upcoming proposed interruptions is appreciated.
Usually I receive two letters and a reminder phone call in some cases, and they also advertise in newspapers/radio.
Lorraine Lewington
Tathra