1998 Auckland power crisis
The 1998 Auckland power crisis was a five-week-long power outage.
Almost all of downtown Auckland in New Zealand was supplied electricity by Mercury Energy via four power cables, two of them 40-year-old oil-filled cables that were past their replacement date. One of the cables failed on 20 January, possibly due to the unusually hot and dry conditions, another on 9 February. Due to the increased load from the failure of the first cables, the remaining two failed on 19 and 20 February, leaving about 20 city blocks (except parts of a few streets) without power.
Queen Street was almost deserted for the first few days, as few businesses could operate. Some brought goods out onto the street to sell, but heavy rain in the first week made that impractical. Generators were brought in from around the country to power essential services and some businesses. These made Queen Street a very noisy place and thus deterred customers. Some businesses estimated that the outage cost them at least NZ$60,000 per week.
The event became an international media spectacle. The story was often exaggerated or embellished when it was reported overseas, giving the impression most of the city or even the entire island was without electricity.
It took five weeks before an emergency overhead line was completed to restore the power supply. For much of that time, about 60,000 of the 74,000 people who worked in the area worked from home or from relocated offices in the suburbs. Some businesses relocated staff to other New Zealand cities, or even to Australia. The majority of the 6,000 apartment dwellers in the area had to find alternative accommodation.
Temporary power was supplied for a while from large container ships at the port supplying power to the CBD grid. New power lines to the CBD were strung along power poles alongside railway lines.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Detailed write up by Peter Gutmann
- Final report of the Ministerial Inquiry into the Auckland Power Supply Failure
