Staff get break as city shuts down

Thousands of city workers were given half an hour off yesterday after power to New Plymouth's CBD was knocked out for 20 minutes when an isolator failed at a central city sub-station.

Workers migrated out of their offices and on to the streets to see what the matter was when the city seemingly shut down at about 10.15am.

Although Westpac Bank employees were enjoying their impromptu break in the sun, they were not happy about the work they would have to redo when the power was reconnected.

Manager Helen McGill said when the power went out bank employees needed to get all of the customers out and manually shut the electronic sliding doors.

"We have to do it for safety reasons," Mrs McGill explained.

Meanwhile, across the road at Lander and Black Pharmacy, Brent Lander was writing out prescriptions the old fashioned way – with a pen.

Rebecca Wilson, communication manager for Transpower, said the piece of electrical equipment was tripped while staff were undertaking maintenance at the Carrington St sub-station. "Fortunately we did have technicians on site so they were able to put the piece of equipment back in quite quickly," Mrs Wilson said.

The power was out for about 20 minutes and affected about 4600 customers, primarily in the New Plymouth CBD.

New Plymouth lift servicing company, Another Level Electrical, was called to numerous businesses around town to check for trapped people.

A technician freed a couple of people frwom a lift at the Waterfront Hotel's Salt Restaurant and another person from the Ministry of Social Development's elevator.

Mrs Wilson said Transpower is still looking into the cause of the fault and how to prevent it from happening again. "We have technicians to look at it and try and mitigate against loss of supply," she said. "Although you can never say it will never happen again we have not had a major loss of supply in New Plymouth CBD for a long time and in this instance we were able to get in quite quickly."

- © Fairfax NZ News