Orion was pleased to participate in a South Island-wide exercise yesterday to test our response structures and protocols for an Alpine Fault (AF8) earthquake event.
Exercise Pandora was carried out yesterday as an inter-regional tabletop exercise across multiple agencies, including Civil Defence Emergency Management, Councils, and utilities providers.
In the simulation, the Orion team worked through day three after the earthquake. The scenario had approximately 67,500 customers, or 36% of Christchurch customers, and approximately 3,500, or 9% of Selwyn customers without power on the Orion network.
Using the Coordinated Incident Management System (CIMS), a mock Emergency Operations Centre was established at the Orion office, with key functions assigned to people, including Operations, Logistics, Welfare, Planning and Intelligence.
“Orion is committed to its emergency management programme and ensuring that we continue to build and maintain capability across the four Rs of emergency management (Reduction, Readiness, Response and Recovery),” says Orion GM Electricity Network Steve Macdonald.
“Participation in these types of exercises allows us to test our processes and strengthen relationships with our partners so we have an effective and well-coordinated response for the communities we serve, if the worst were to happen.”
With a 75 per cent chance of an alpine fault rupture in the next 50 years, preparation is critical. Our priority is to restore power as safely and quickly as possible. However, in the event of a severe natural disaster like an Alpine Fault earthquake, power could be out for days or even weeks.
Find out more about what you can do to be prepared.