‘No cooling, no mobiles, no business’: power outages cripple townships in WA’s Mid West

About 8000 Mid West homes and businesses had no electricity today — and Western Power warned not all services would be restored tonight. “Affected customers have been notified by SMS, advising that if power has not been restored by 7pm, it’s likely to remain off overnight,” a spokeswoman said. Power went out in the whole of Coorow Shire about 6am, according to acting Shire chief executive John Merrick. “Unfortunately for the residents of Green Head when the power goes out, there is no mobile phone service which in a fire season is probably not ideal,” he said. “Telstra has not repaired their battery back-up for the mobile phone tower, despite being requested to do so for four years. “Our main issue is emergency contact with mobiles.” Kalbarri resident Peter Stewart said he luckily only lost power for about 20 minutes. “I know there are two links coming into town and when I did look at the Western Power map it said the whole of Kalbarri so it must have been the main feeder,” he said. It followed earlier outages in Irwin Shire and southern parts of the City of Greater Geraldton. Bootenal resident Helen Clarke said she had no electricity for 14 hours from Saturday leading into Sunday on what was a hot weekend. “On Monday we had about four hours out,” she said. Irwin Shire chief executive Shane Ivers said local businesses lost trade when they lost power. “It literally wiped out business activity for Monday,” he said. ”In town there was a few local businesses that were not impressed at losing business on what was a reasonable trading day.” Mr Ivers said Western Power had two feeder lines in the town, one of which supplied Dongara and Port Denison. “The one into Dongara went out about 2am Monday morning and they restored it that Monday night — it lasted around about 17 hours,” he said. “On Monday they issued a fire ban from Perth up to Geraldton and that restricts Western Power. “They can exercise an exemption if the risk assessment indicates energising power lines will not result in a bushfire.” A Western Power spokeswoman said humid conditions or light drizzling rain could combine with dust and pollution to create “tracks” on pole insulators which let electricity jump across, causing damage to poles. She said all available teams were working around the clock to restore power safely to affected communities. “Western Power’s network maintenance programs are constantly improving the way assets are managed, including the 860,000 poles in the network,” she said. “On top of the scheduled $400 million per year poles and wires maintenance, we have a $90 million per year preventative program which includes applying silicone coating to insulators, managing trees and vegetation near wires, and high-pressure cleaning of insulators. “We’re also continuing our pole top fire modelling research to improve our ability to predict periods of risk where weather may affect the network.”