Message from Western Power to Gingin Community

We understand the frustration and inconvenience the current power outages are causing and want to provide you with an update on works completed today.

Crews have made good progress at restoration despite significant damage to our infrastructure and the surrounding area. At the peak of the storm incident, about 34,000 customers were without power. We have since restored about 18,000 of these customers and will work methodically and safely to restore more customers as the evening progresses and over coming days. About 16,000 customers are currently without power.

Western Power crews worked through the night and have continued work today to respond to hundreds of hazards (more than 300 of which were initially reported after the storm) and we have over 80 remaining that we are responding to make safe before repairs and restoration can commence.

We know that there are still some customers who are without power following other severe weather (bushfire, storms and heatwave) conditions which occurred prior to the storm, rest assured we know your outages have been extended and frustrating and we are working hard to restore you as soon as we can.

Full customer restoration will take a number of days and we are prioritising critical infrastructure in areas where hospitals and other emergency services are located, high voltage bulk transmission lines that supply power to thousands of customers, and localised faults that affect clusters of homes and businesses.

At this stage we can’t deploy network generators until we have responded to all hazards and made safe.

The damage we are seeing is widespread and generators will only help very small pockets. We’re assessing where and when they can be used to ensure maximum community benefit.

We’d urge the community to treat all damaged infrastructure as live – just because your home or area is without power does not mean that all infrastructure in the area is non-operational.

We would like to remind everyone, that if you see any damage to the network, please stay eight metres away and Make The Safe Call to Western Power on the emergency 24/7 number 13 13 51 so that emergency response crews can attend the hazard to make the area safe.

The Bureau of Meteorology are also forecasting another severe thunderstorm with potential for damaging winds, large hailstones and heavy rainfall this evening in the Gascoyne, Central Wheat Belt and Central West districts and we are on standby to respond if required. If outages occur our network operations team will attempt to restore power remotely where possible, and crews will respond to any incidents as soon as it is safe to do so once the storm front passes.

We know some customers are currently impacted by mobile phone outages relating to lack of power. We understand that Telstra is deploying power technicians equipped with portable generators to strategic priority sites when and where it is safe to do so.

More than 23,000 calls have been received by our customer call centre in the last 48 hours, and we are communicating directly with impacted customers including via SMS.

On the ground, the safety of our crews and the community are of the highest importance. That’s why customers may see crews attending a location where damage has occurred and then departing before power is restored. Our initial goal is to make damaged infrastructure safe prior to repair and restoration and we are working to complete these jobs as soon as safe to do so.

Customers who have experienced an outage for longer than 12 consecutive hours can apply for an extended outage payment via Extended Outages Payment once power is reconnected.

Stay up to date by visiting our outage page at www.westernpower.com.au/faults-outages and emergency.wa.gov.au

Thank you.

Western Power Media and Communications Team