Maintenance mishap blamed for leaving 24,000 properties without power

Communities throughout the Mid West were left without power for almost six hours when the largest blackout since cyclone Seroja struck the region on March 14.

Western Power said the outage was caused by a mishap during planned maintenance work and was unrelated to other recent outages in the region.

The City of Greater Geraldton’s mayor and the State Opposition both said it demonstrated how vulnerable the Mid West’s electrical infrastructure is and that upgrades were needed.

The outage affected about 24,000 homes and businesses in 105 locations north of Three Springs, including Geraldton, Dongara, Mullewa and Northampton.

Western Power said the outage began at 4.50am when a protection device tripped on the transmission network. Power was restored around 10.45am by crews using separate feeder lines.

A spokesperson said planned maintenance work caused the incident and it was unrelated to previous faults which have recently affected the Dongara area.

Backup generators supporting the area also experienced a separate fault, which Western Power said may have been caused by a fault on privately owned equipment.

Some businesses were forced to close during the outage and Telstra said some mobile services were affected.

Traffic lights in Geraldton also stopped working, forcing drivers to cautiously navigate the city’s intersections.

City of Greater Geraldton mayor Shane Van Styn said while this incident appeared to a one-off event, the numerous outages in the region highlighted the vulnerability of the Mid West’s infrastructure.

“It does underscore the fragility of the line, especially taking into account the State Government’s ambitions for having renewable hydrogen, electric vehicles and the like in the region going on to a power line that already cannot reliably handle demand at the moment,” he said.

Mr Van Styn said the city had been calling on the government to upgrade transmission lines between Three Spring and Geraldton from 130kV to at least 330 kV for a decade.

Geraldton MLA Lara Dalton said she had been assured by Western Power and Energy Minister Bill Johnston that work was being fast-tracked where possible to improve reliability in the region.

“We can never guarantee 100 per cent reliability, but I know the State Government is doing everything we can to improve local power supply,” she said.

Moore MLA and Opposition Leader Shane Love said the Mid West was disproportionately impacted by power reliability issues and said upgrades were needed.

“We need new high voltage power transmission infrastructure in the Mid West to bring the power to the region and to export power for when new sources are developed locally,” he said.

Western Power will hold a public drop-in community session on March 17 at 12.30pm at the Dongara Sea Rescue building.