Linton’s $400K power woes fix
Powerco is pumping $400,000 into its Linton network to stop the regular power cuts that are irritating residents.
The Palmerston North suburb has experienced 12 power outages since late April, an average of one a week.
Powerco met with 20 disgruntled residents at the Massey University Rugby Institute rooms on Thursday. The company sent out a round of emails inviting people to a meeting to learn about the causes of the cuts, and how they planned to solve the problem.
Powerco network operations manager Phil Marsh said a $400,000 project to reconfigure power lines on the Linton section of the network has been given the go-ahead. The project was expected to take three months, and was due to start in August.
Marsh said some defective equipment, such as twisted crossarms or cracked insulators, was found to be the reason behind several outages since mid-april.
However, the majority were believed to be caused by outside factors, he said. Marsh said there had been problems with canadian geese and ducks flying into overhead lines and trees coming into contact with the power lines.
A May 19 outage was caused by a duck flying into power lines. On June 30, power was again cut after a tree was uprooted and landed on a transformer, in heavy rain.
Resident Arne Evans said the meeting was told about five of the 12 outages had been caused by birds.
Evans had grown utterly fed-up with the outages, which had become so regular he had taken to leaving candles and an LED torch set up on a table in his living room.
He said he had been really angry, but he was impressed by how Powerco fronted up to the meeting.
‘‘They apologised right at the start and laid out what they were going to do to fix it. They’re my new flavour of the month, now.’’
Marsh said several steps had been taken to address the causes of the outages before the project began.
The defective equipment had been replaced and trees have been trimmed back from the power lines.
The reconfiguration would prevent the problem with birds shorting out the power lines by increasing the spacing between the lines.
The lines will be spaced far enough apart that they won’t come into contact with each other when birds fly into them, even with larger birds like canadian geese or swans. This will prevent them from shorting out and causing a power outage.