Northlanders affected by the “entirely avoidable” toppling of a power pylon earlier this year have welcomed Wednesday’s report into the debacle – but say it fails to address the issue of compensation.
The report, ordered by Energy Minister Simeon Brown a day after the pylon fell on 20 June, reiterates previous findings that contractors unbolted three of its four legs at once during routine maintenance.
What is new in today’s Electricity Authority report, however, is that it exposes failings at national grid operator Transpower that allowed the accident to occur.
It also reveals a senior engineer warned Transpower in 2021 about a “knowledge gap” among maintenance crews working on pylon foundations – but nothing was done about it.
The report states the error that led to the collapse was not a one-off, though a lack of documentation meant the report’s author could not say how many times it had occurred before.
The report, and its raft of recommendations, has been welcomed by Northlanders like Richard Holt.
Holt owns Cellini’s Ice Cream and Espresso Bar in Paihia and had just taken a large delivery of milk and cream when the power went out about 11am.
Holt estimated the outage cost him about $6000 in stock that could not be refrigerated plus lost sales.
Paihia was one of the last places in Northland for power to be restored.
While Holt was pleased with the report and its raft of recommendations, he said it failed to address the issue of compensation for business owners who had lost money through no fault of their own.
“It doesn’t really give any answers as to, how do you make reparations, or what do you do moving forward? It talks about improving how Transpower looks over their contractors but it doesn’t really deal with what happened.
“Was it 88,000 people that were affected? People like myself, that had losses, and my losses are much smaller than some others, what happens with that? Are we supposed to just forget about it?”
Northland MP Grant McCallum said the report confirmed what he already suspected – that “gross incompetence” was behind the outage.
“But what we have learned from this report is that it wasn’t just the contractor that was at fault, Transpower’s systems themselves were at fault. And what really concerns me, is back in 2021, you had a situation where an engineer reported potential failures in their systems, and there was no action taken.”
McCallum said he was still pushing for compensation, though he had been advised his initial idea of a year-long discount for all Northland power users was too difficult to implement.
Instead, he was now calling for a one-off payment that could be distributed by an organisation such as Northland Inc.
“I’m still looking for at least a seven-figure sum for the wider use of the Northland community. That’s the least they can do for the people of Northland.”
Northland Chamber of Commerce chief executive Darryn Fisher has also been vocal about the need for compensation.
He said he was grateful to the energy minister for ordering the review.
Fisher said the outage caused up to $80 million in losses, but worse than that was the effect on confidence in the region as a place to do business.
He noted the report did not shut the door on compensation, even though Transpower said it was under no legal obligation to pay up.
The effect of the outage on small businesses like Holt’s was raised at a press conference with Brown asked if he had a message for the Paihia shop owner.
“I’d say to him, that this is an incredibly unfortunate situation, it was completely avoidable, and the government has undertaken this review to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” Brown said.
Holt said he hoped for changes in the way large companies like Transpower were run.
“I’d like to see people made responsible for their inept activity. These companies are making money off the very people that were negatively impacted by this, so, how about we get remunerated, because we had absolutely no responsibility for any of this.”
Transpower’s executive general manager Mark Ryall for grid delivery, said the report confirmed the findings of Transpower’s own report – the tower fell because an Omexom crew performing routine maintenance work did not follow their own standard practice, and removed all of the nuts from three of the tower’s four legs.
“Our core role is to ensure a secure and reliable national electricity grid for New Zealanders, and we never like to see people go without power. We apologise to everyone who was impacted by this event,” he said.
Ryall said Transpower accepted the report’s recommendations and was pleased they were broader than just Transpower and Omexom.
Remarkably, no one was injured when the pylon fell at Glorit, about midway between Helensville and Wellsford.
Normally, Northland has a backup circuit that would have kept power flowing but that had been shut down for maintenance.
Transpower’s report found the workers who had removed too many nuts were unsupervised at the time and inadequately trained.
The policy of Omexom, a Singapore-owned contracting company, was to remove the nuts from only one baseplate at a time.
By 11pm that night, power had been restored to all domestic customers in the Northpower network serving Whangārei and Kaipara districts.
Most customers in Far North, served by lines company Top Energy, also had power restored that night – with the exception of part of central Paihia, where the lights did not come back on until mid-morning the next day.
Power remained limited that weekend, with lines companies turning off hot water cylinders around the region to reduce power use.
Northland’s big industrial power users agreed to stop production until the following Monday.
They included Fonterra’s dairy factories at Maungaturoto and Kauri, Golden Bay Cement at Portland, and JNL timber mill in Kaitāia.
One company estimated four days of lost production had cost it $400,000.
A temporary pylon at Glorit was erected three days later, and three single-pole towers replacing the pylon were completed three days after that.
With its extensive geothermal and solar generation, the Far North is in theory, self-sufficient in power – but its power stations are unable to operate when they are not connected to the national grid.
The Northland-wide power outage came against a backdrop of major infrastructure failures in the region.
At the time, State Highway 1 was closed at the Brynderwyn Hills and Mangamuka Gorge for slip repairs, and the Northland railway line was closed due to cyclone damage.
Of those, only SH1 at the Brynderwyns has reopened.