Thousands of homes without power for Victoria’s scorcher

Almost 3000 homes are without power as the state swelters.

The unplanned outage, which began last night, is effecting residents across northern parts of the state including about 1200 properties in Nagambie, which is expecting 41° today.

Local member, Nationals Deputy Leader Steph Ryan, has told 3AW power distributor AusNet Services expects most of the properties will be offline until about 5pm.

AusNet Services described it to Neil Mitchell as a “really unfortunate” incident and unrelated to overload.

“It’s an underground cable fault,” AusNet executive Alistair Parker told Neil Mitchell.

“Cables underground are brilliant – really, really reliable – but when they’re underground it’s hard to find.

“We only found where that was about 5am this morning.

“If it all goes to plan it will be back online about 5pm.

“In the meantime, we’ve got another team that put on a couple of generators on in the Nagambie township, so that will get about 400 of our customers back on there.”

He recommended anyone without power prone to heat stress should head to nearby Seymour, which is unaffected.

Click PLAY for full interview

Meanwhile, Mr Parker explained why AusNet Services decided to cancel a planned power outage in Mooroolbark.

“To be blunt, every little bit counts”- GM of Ausnet Alistair Parker – asking us to holdoff doing the load of washing etc till Friday night or the weekend even.

— Heidi Murphy (@heidimur) January 23, 2019

Ausnet reveals it’s only had 1000 people sign up to reduce power use at peak demand times.. They want more. It’s called “demand side response intiatives”..
Incentives “are a bit more than a double movie pass.. but not much more..”

— Heidi Murphy (@heidimur) January 23, 2019