Northpower Electricity Supply Situation - 16/7

Date: Monday 16th July 2007 8.30am

Subject: Northpower Electricity Supply Situation

With all available staff including our remote teams from as far a field as Wellington working round the clock during the weekend we managed to get all main network lines operational by Saturday night. Field staff have been working to near exhaustion everyday since last Tuesday.

Virtually all that remains now, is to repair customers own service lines that have significant damage such as broken poles. We have all our staff now directed at fixing these customer lines. We estimate that there are 250 customers in this situation.

We also ask any customers who still have no power to contact us so that we can provide assistance. Access has improved dramatically and we can now get to most customers that have been isolated.

At the peak of the storm last week we had 18,600 customers without power. This is 40% of the network. Most damage was caused by trees falling across lines. The magnitude of damage on the Northpower network was much greater than cyclone Bola in March 1988.

We had 150 staff working to restore power, which was over 3 times the staff normally engaged in fieldwork. There was also additional support staff providing hot food, answering fault calls, providing organisation for restoration and many other tasks.

We appreciate all the positive comments we have had from customers and also understand the distress that some customers have experienced.

ENDS

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