Major power outage hits 10,000 Upper Clutha homes

First published 10.50am, Monday January 8.

Aurroa Energy is currently investigating the reason for a power outage that caused more than 10,000 homes in the Upper Clutha area to be without power this morning.

The outage hit homes and businesses in Wānaka, Hāwea and Hāwea Flat, Luggate and along the Lindis Pass-Tarras Road.

It happened just after 8.00 am this morning, and power was restored to most homes within one hour. 

During this time, the Aurora Energy website was also down. 

Not very useful - Upper Clutha residents found this message on the Aurora website when checking for details on this morning's outage.

Aurora Energy has told Crux they will issue a statement on the outage and the website fault when they know more. 

At 4pm, the company was unable to provide a concrete answer.

It's customer manager Sian Sutton told Crux in a written statement, that whilst undertaking planned maintenance on one of our two supplies into the Upper Clutha region this morning, Aurora experienced an outage on the remaining in-service supply.

Ms Sutton says they have started an investigation into the cause of the outage.

As for the website outage, Ms Suttons explains the large number of streets involved in this morning’s power outage caused the server to ‘hang’ while the data was uploading and this caused the new website to freeze.

"Aurora Energy launched a new website last September with enhanced power outage information that includes automated updates and an outages map.... this scenario was tested prior to the site going live but not to the extent of this morning’s event."

The company is working on a permanent solution to their IT systems. 

Ms Sutton thanks customers for their understanding, especially when the outage impacted a large number of people in popular holiday hot spots.