Wild wind gusts cause power outages
A wild night of weather with wind gusts reaching up to 80km/h cut power to 3170 Whanganui properties on Monday night.
On Tuesday morning 25 properties were still without power.
MetService meteorologist Ngaire Wotherspoon said at 3am there was 9.4mm of rain in just one hour.
“Some people might have been woken up by that.”
At 9pm on Monday wind gusts were up to 80km/h.
A Powerco spokesman said there were two unplanned outages affecting multiple customers in the Whanganui region overnight.
The first occurred at 7.18pm in the Bastia Hill area.
Initially, 3145 customers were affected but power was progressively restored over the following hour and all customers were reconnected by 8.13pm.
“Crews are returning to site [on Tuesday] to conduct testing to determine the cause of the outage.”
The second outage occurred in the Parikino area northwest of Whanganui. Power went off for 25 customers at 7.45pm. Field crews patrolled the area looking for the cause.
The work was paused once it got dark, due to the windy conditions making it too dangerous to continue.
“Crews are returning [on Tuesday] morning to resume patrols so that the site of the outage can be located and repair work carried out.”
Power was restored later yesterday.
Wotherspoon said over the 24 hours to yesterday morning, Whanganui experienced 23.2mm of rain.
There were still showers passing through yesterday and it would continue to “feel like a rainy day”.
Monday had brought an intense front, but the weather calmed down into Tuesday evening.
A Whanganui District Council spokeswoman said as a result of the weather the council received two callouts about fallen branches. A contractor cleared the sites. A minor slip on Papaiti Rd was cleared early yesterday.