Switching restores power quickly following car accident
A car hit a power pole around 12:30am on Thursday 1 August, resulting in 2,635 customers in Halswell, Hornby, Prebbleton and several surrounding areas losing power.
The incident took place on Marshs Rd, where a car hit the only pole on the road carrying both 33,000 volt and 11,000 volt lines, taking out the supply to Prebbleton Zone Substation and a substation on Shands Rd. This resulted in the widespread outage. The pole was severely damaged by the impact and had to be replaced.
Fortunately, a solution was achieved by some quick thinking from Orion’s network controllers, utilising the resilience built into many parts of the Orion network where there are options to switch around faults by feeding customers using alternate lines. Investment in network resilience pays off because on this occasion, all but seven impacted customers were able to have power restored in just over an hour.
“I looked at the situation with our rostered Network Controller and decided the best option was to close a switch that we don’t use often, as the planning involved to use this switch is more complex. This allowed our Controller to restore all Prebbleton and Shands Rd customers in a relatively short time. This option simplified switching at 2.00am and resulted in the least disruption for customers,” says Orion Control Centre Manager Dayle McDrury.
“Had we worked through the 11,000 volt switching this would have caused issues the following morning due to the network configuration around the Shands Rd substation and a larger number of customers would have been affected by the replacement of the damaged pole,” says Dayle.
Although all customers have been safely powered using this alternate network configuration since the event, for technical reasons, and to avoid potential longer-term disruption to customers, we require a brief planned outage to restore the network to its normal configuration.
To minimise disruption to customers, we’ve planned this for 4:00am on Saturday 17 August 2024
Find details about this planned work INCD-66228-K
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