Early morning power cut could have been bird strike - Aurora

Crux asked Aurora Energy what was behind this morning's 2 hour power cut that affected Lakes Hayes Estate and Shotover Country. Here's their response: 

“At approximately 7am this morning customers in Lake Hayes, Lower Shotover and the surrounding areas lost power.

“We despatched our contractors when we became aware of the issue and the fault crew patrolled the lines. No fault was found and all power was restored by 08.42am.  The cause of this outage is unknown but in most cases an event like this, where there is no fault found, we generally associate this with a bird strike or similar.  If a pattern were to emerge on this line we would conduct a full investigation but currently we consider this a once off event.

“During this time, we experienced a technical issue with our phone system which prevented the connection of some customer calls. We are currently working with our telephone service provider to stand up interactive voice response for all our network feeders meaning in large events we have an automated update available to customers, which will reduce congestion on our phone lines and greatly reduce wait times.

“We kept the community updated through our website and Facebook. Aurora’s Facebook is monitored from 8am – 9pm, and our website is updated 24/7.