Aircraft Cause of Ohakune Outage

Ruapehu Bulletin, Volume 11, Issue 509, 26 October 1993, Page 11

Aircraft Cause of Ohakune Outage

■ An aircraft flew through an llkV power line on p Mangateitei Road (Ohakune) on 10 September, causing a 1 25 minute power cut for 400 customers on King Country | Energy' s Turoa feeder. The wire strike, which occurred at 7.45 am, resulted in | loss of supply of 10,000 customer minutes, but caused no | damage to the aircraft. I Meanwhile a ditch digger damaged a low tension line on | KaraNgahape Road at Turangi, cutting supply for an hour | and a half to one customer. | High winds were responsible for many of the outages I recorded by King Country Energy during September with 1 1 1 of the 27 faults reported attributed to this cause. The average length of time any of the board's 12,306 customers were without power during September was j 8.91 minutes. I KCE general manager Peter Till says analysis of the overall faults figures for the past four years shows a steady improvement, in spite of a blowout last year when a transformer at the Kuratau Power Station seriously mal-

functioned. "The average length of time any of our customers is without power has continued to drop over this period and shows that the maintenance pro-grammes are bearing fruit," Mr Till said.