Editorial: We must learn from power cut

OPINION: It's not as if the reminder was necessarily needed, but Tuesday morning's power cut, which affected some 20,000 Timaru residents, was a wake-up call about how dependent we are on power to function properly as a community.

True, people showed themselves to be eminently resourceful in getting through the short-term pain the power cut brought on, but the consequences went a lot further than people not being able to get a coffee, or money out of the ATM.

Businesses were obviously most seriously affected, in terms of lost production and missed deadlines. Several of those problems were detailed in yesterday's Herald.

In the national scheme of things, Timaru doesn't have a particularly large concentration of businesses and yet the power outage had major ramifications for several production plants and the Smithfield meatworks.

Ironically, many in Timaru and neighbouring communities like Ashburton scoffed a little when a major power cut knocked out much of Auckland on June 12, 2006. Of course, much of the scoffing was at the national news coverage which focused extensively on Auckland's outage on a day when Mid and South Canterbury were blanketed by the heaviest snowfall in 60 years. Some residents were to be without power for weeks.

But Tuesday probably demonstrated on a small scale the seriousness of what happened in Auckland that day, and gave some insight into how much production and money was lost there.

Fortunately for the Timaru businesses affected on Tuesday, power was restored reasonably quickly, though as luck would have it, parts of Washdyke were among those areas left without power the longest.

What those businesses need now is undoubtedly some reassurance around the security of their power supply in future.

Plainly, achieving that has two parts. Firstly, could those affected have mitigated the effects of the outage by having measures in place, such as back-up generators, which would have enabled them to continue production? If they didn't, the costs that would be incurred to put such measures in place need to be assessed against the savings that could be made.

A factor in such assessments will presumably be that, fortunately, such major outages are rare.

Then, clearly, the businesses need to be assured that Alpine Energy is thoroughly investigating the power cut to see what can be learned and to decide if there are any measures that need to be taken to minimise the risk of similar outages in future.

Hopefully we won't see another cut like Tuesday's for a long time, but if we do, it would be reassuring to know we're equipped to minimise its effects.

- © Fairfax NZ News