Page 4 The Moorabool News – 22 March, 2022
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Blackouts frustrate Blackwood By Lachlan Ellis More than half a dozen power outages in the space of a fortnight have drawn the ire of Blackwood residents, with business and services affected, and food going to waste. In a media release dated Thursday 10 March, Powercor said customers had experienced “seven unplanned outages since 23 February”. Over 11 days, the issue was narrowed down from the 260-kilometre line to a 20-kilometre section, then finally to a 400-metre section in Blackwood. Powercor crews visited Blackwood on 9 March and inspected seven power poles along Martin Street South, replacing lighting surge arrestors, fuses, insulators, and high-voltage leads. “After careful examination of these items, crews found an insulator that had visible burn marks indicating a fault had occurred. This is consistent with what our engineering teams expected to be found from the type of fault believed to have caused the outages,” Powercor’s statement reads. “However, to be certain there are no other faults occurring, we are continuing to test the network. Crews will to be closely monitoring while these tests occur and will be available to respond quickly if issues occur.” But despite Powercor’s reassurances, locals are not convinced the power supply won’t shut off again in the near future. Carol Guthrie runs Jindarup, a local post office, general store, and café. She said the outages had been disruptive not just to her business and those around it, but to the whole town. “The outages varied, some went for a couple of hours…they seemed to always occur around, say, 9 o’clock and 10:30pm at night. They all went out for different amounts of time, one went for more than 12 hours,” she told the Moorabool News.
“For us personally, we live out of town… whenever there’s an outage, we try to put on a generator to save any perishables. The night of that 12 hour plus outage, we had to go up to the shop and stay with the generator to monitor it, refuel it, and monitor our fridge temperatures. We had to stay up basically all night, and then front for work the next day. “We’ve also got elderly people and people with chronic illnesses in town, who might need emergency help at any minute, and a lot of them are not able to communicate without electricity. Others are on machines to assist them with breathing, it’s an absolute necessity they’re on those machines through the night,” she said. Despite Powercor identifying many issues with Blackwood’s power connection, Ms Guthrie said she remains “concerned about the maintenance of the power infrastructure around our area”. Another local, Jinny Coyle, runs a graphic design business, and with most of her customers being from out of town, reliable power and internet are crucial. “We’ve always had power outages here; it is something we accept to some degree…but not this amount. I believe the only reason Powercor has really taken things on board is because Trentham has also had these power outages,” she said. “If you had asked Powercor for texts about outages, you’d get a text saying, ‘Power’s out, we don’t know why, we’re investigating’, then they’d give you a time it’d come back on. But that time would pass and all of a sudden, they’d say, ‘No, it’s going to be another two hours, or another four hours’.” Blackwood’s power comes from the Woodend line, and with Blackwood located at the end of that line, locals have complained for years of an unreliable power supply.
Blackwood residents have been burning their candles at both ends with numerous recent blackouts. Photo by Masha Raymers from Pexels
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