Stuck in the dark

URGENT appeals by PowerWater have been sent to homeowners and businesses still without power as fears grow some customers are not on the list of known outages.

A PowerWater spokesman said anyone who has not got power should contact the emergency line to make sure their address is on the list.

“We want to make sure no customer has slipped through the cracks,” he said.

The appeal came as PowerWater continued to make progress on reducing the number of customers still without power.

Yesterday marked a week since Cyclone Marcus cut a path of destruction through Darwin and caused chaos with city, suburban and rural power supply.

Some 27,000 customers were left without power.

Late yesterday the number of customers still without power stood at 1080.

Of these, 790 were individual services.

The worst-case scenario is that full restoration of power would not be completed until the coming Thursday.

“We are still doing small pockets of customers without power,” the PowerWater spokesman said.

“We will start to swing major resources into fixing the problems of individual customers.

“This, of course, is going to be time-consuming because of the individual nature of each problem. If we go like we have so far, we think we can clear 150 of the individual service locations a day.

“We have 22 crews rostered on and they are chipping away at the task, and we are inching closer to full restoration.”

The spokesman said there were still concerns about lines which are down.

“We do not want anyone thinking that these lines are safe,” he said.

“It is important that anyone who sees a line down considers it to still be live.

“I don’t want to be alarmist. I want people to be safe.”

The PowerWater emergency call line is 1800 245 092.