Editorial: Buck stops with Patrick and Paul

OPINION: There should be some very red faces around the boardroom tables of Transpower and Telecom this week.

The extensive meltdown in services to thousands of their customers in two separate events has led to much wailing and hand-wringing around the country.

First to stumble was Transpower when 50,000 Auckland homes, street lights, rail services and businesses were crippled on Monday after a fire hundreds of kilometres away in the Waikato cut supply. The blaze in a stand of pine trees caused a series of explosions as the Whakamaru-to-Auckland line short-circuited. The vitriolic blame-game that followed was as astounding to those living outside Auckland as was the disruption to those affected.

Transpower chief executive Dr Patrick Strange damned farmer Steve Meier for causing the chaos, citing a five-year battle over access to the lines. Dr Strange alleged his company had tried to go on to the land to trim the trees but was blocked by Mr Meier, who countered by saying he warned Transpower five years ago of the danger of a fire.

Someone was telling porkies but Mr Meier's pylon protests and aversion to having Transpower workers on his land are well documented. They are concerns that should have been sorted out long before this week's bedlam. While that might not be Dr Strange's immediate responsibility, the buck certainly stops with him when it makes national headlines and parts of the country's largest city grind to a standstill. Dr Strange would be one of those highly paid company executives who you would expect to have public and human relations ticked high in his curriculum vitae. Obviously not, if the Meier standoff has festered for all these years.

Just as the power supply crisis receded the focus switched down the street to Dr Strange's counterpart at Telecom, Paul Reynolds.

The cause of the anxiety there was the second major crash of its XT system in as many months. On Wednesday XT customers south of Taupo couldn't make or receive calls, send text messages or use broadband without considerable difficulty. Yesterday morning 10,000 South Island customers were still in bother as engineers strived to fix a dodgy piece of hardware alleged to be at the root of the problem. Dr Reynolds told us the said hardware had "signalled erratically and degraded the network's service". What mumbo jumbo. The wonkiest signal came from Dr Reynolds whose best attempt to appease the aggrieved was news he had "commissioned for an independent review of the network". That is the piffle chief executives can get away with when they work in an industry that largely has a two-horse monopoly of supply.

- © Fairfax NZ News