Power failures bitter pill for Lake St traders
PETER CARRUTHERS with confidence but asked if the city’s power infrastructure is equipped to cope with increased energy demand.
“If we can’t handle it now how are we going to handle it with two new big hotels on the block,” he said. “The last thing we want is people on Facebook and Instagram saying ‘I am in Cairns and the power has gone out every night we have gone out to dinner’.”
Downunder Bar owner Harry Treklis said he planned to pursue Ergon Energy for losses after punters left his bar in droves.
“I am very frustrated. It’s not good for the business and not good for the customers,” he said.
Ergon told the Cairns Post it did not know the cause of the recent outages and indicated the heatwave had increased power demand across the network.
“We have not determined the cause of recent outages in the Cairns CBD,” a spokeswoman said. “However we can reassure the business community that we are investigating the faults as a priority.” ANDREA FALVO AND JACK LAWRIE EXTREME hot and dry conditions across the Far North are sparking a series of bushfires that are keeping emergency services on their toes.
Fires at Cardwell, Mutchilba, Millstream and other parts of the region are being monitored.
According to a QFES spokeswoman, the fire near Cardwell, near Ellerbeck Road, Attie Creek Road and Elphinstone Range involved 11 crews who worked through the night to control the blaze.
The fire and another at Walkamin, which spread from Mutchilba Rd, had firefighters urging residents to keep an eye on updates and be wary of nearby smoke hazards.
Queensland Fire and Emergency Services Far North acting Assistant Commissioner Adam Gwin said the region had been hit with fires earlier than normal.
He said crews would continue to maintain and monitor the fires.
“We certainly do not, even with the reprieve of afternoon storms, believe that any of the threat has passed,” he said.
“We are still very much in a heightened state of awareness.
“We’ve got a few fires on the books at the moment, what we class as level 1 incidents, but that’s just the nature of the environment that we’re in at the moment.
“We’ve got a delayed wet season so haven’t had the rains that we would typically have around this time and obviously there’s still some dry vegetation out there.
“That will continue for some period of time yet until we get some well-earned relief – all rain is good rain at the moment.”
Acting Assistant Commissioner Gwin said more than 10 QFES staff members had been deployed to Central Queensland to assist.