Lake Ohau Village residents faced a long, dark night while the area's power company worked to repair a fault.

Up to 50 Network Waitaki customers in the village were without power from 12.30pm yesterday and were still waiting for it to be restored at 9pm.

Resident Barbara MacKay said she understood the outage had affected the entire Ohau area.

"We're OK but the freezer has started to defrost," she said.

Her landline had also gone down because the phone relied on a power source. She said if it went on for much longer, it could become a problem.

Network manager Glynne Lloyd said the fault was in a 15-kilometre-long section of cable.

He said it had taken longer to find the fault than usual because of the length and that the line did not follow a road.

By 3pm, the affected line had been found but workers had to "systematically" find the section that required maintenance, Mr Lloyd said.

"There had been a cracked insulator. As soon as it got a bit of drizzle on it, it started to arc and burnt through the conductor."

Mr Lloyd said up to 50 customers would have been affected, including village residents and neighbouring farms.

He said work was under way to have power restored as soon as possible. Another fault in the area on Saturday left some Ohau residents without power for 20 minutes.

A magpie was understood to have "shorted" the line on Saturday, Mr Lloyd said.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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