Yorke Peninsula Power Outage

Mr ELLIS (Narungga) (15:39): I rise today to draw to the house's attention the absolutely farcical situation that the good people of Yorke Peninsula found themselves in on Friday 14 March. We had the extraordinary situation where the power went out before most of us woke up on Friday morning and did not come back on until most of us had gone sleep that night. It was a really extraordinary situation where we were without power for almost 20 hours and the impact that had on our community was immense.

In the time since that occurred, I have taken calls from numerous businesses that have outlined to me the cost that has imposed upon them. There has been stock they have had to discard because it has spoiled, there has been lost trade, missed out on because they could not turn the lights on, and there have been clients who have had to be rescheduled because they can no longer be fitted in.

Truthfully, I had my car booked in for a service on Friday and it was not able to be done then obviously, so now that garage has had to bring in mechanics early every day this week to make up for the backlog they missed on Friday. That is an extra cost to that business owner that he would not have had to incur otherwise that will not be compensated because it is a fault of the transmission service rather than the service provision.

That does not matter one iota to the people on the ground. It does not matter to them how the power went out. It only matters that they did not have it for near on 20 hours and it has an extraordinary impact on our community. I have mentioned the business impacts, but it also impacted individuals.

I had a call from a gentleman who relies upon medication that needs to be refrigerated to stay good. He was beside himself because of the litany of power outages that led up to Friday and then, of course, the main outage on the Friday, and he was worried that his life-saving medication would spoil and he would no longer be able to use it. Now that is an expense that he would have to incur to replace it, but further to that it puts him in an invidious position where he might be without the medication that he needs. He had to make a mercy dash to Adelaide to find a fridge that he could put that medication in to keep it and prevent it from going poorly.

This has had an extraordinary impact on our community, an extraordinary impact on our local economy and something needs to happen to make sure it does not happen again and also that we can provide recompense to those people who lost income because of it. I think most galling for our community, perhaps, was the explanation given by the powers that be—pardon the pun—for the reason the power went out. We were told that the power went out because the insulators on the transmission lines were dirty after a long and hot summer.

Well, I can tell you that we live in the driest state on the driest continent in the world, and the fact that we rely on rainfall to clean our transmission lines is an absolute farce. Why we would rely on the variety of our natural climate to clean and make sure that we can continue to have access to reliable power is just beyond me. I think it is an extraordinary situation and one that should be rectified immediately, so I am calling on ElectraNet and SAPN to immediately institute proactive routine cleaning of key insulators along our network. This cannot be left until it is needed. This cannot be left until it is imminently going to break down. We need to do this proactively and routinely to make sure that we are never put in this position again.

I also take issue, and I think the community also takes issue, with this argument that there was maintenance booked in for Sunday 16 March, two days after the power went out for 20 hours, and that they were coming around to it, they were going to get to it, but unfortunately it happened before they could get there. Locals will tell you that the power has been going on and off for weeks leading up to this. If I had a dollar for every call I have had from a constituent who has told me a story about a Stobie pole arcing and a fire starting directly underneath it, or it glowing and hissing as they drove past, I could almost pay the person to do the cleaning to make sure that our electricity reliability was there.

There are stories aplenty of people who have seen arcing powerlines and Stobie poles glowing in the dark and have real concerns about what that meant for their local power supply. I talked to a gentleman from Port Clinton and we went through his phone and the messages from SAPN about the power outages that he had put up with in the week leading up to Friday 14 March: for 12 hours on Tuesday 11 March, according to his phone messages, he was without power; from 7am to 1.20 on Wednesday, according to his phone messages, he was without power; and Friday, obviously, he was without power for some 20 hours. Then again on Monday just gone, he was without power for a few hours again. It is this extraordinary situation where we have had all these incidents and it has not done anything.

I got a message just today from a person in SYP. They had fires underneath Stobie poles in December, February and March recently. One of those incidents was nine fires along a line of Stobie poles that CFS crews were actively trying to put out while other fires started around them. It is an extraordinary situation, and plenty of notice for those powers that be to make changes.

There are three things that I am calling for going forward. One, we need to find a way to provide compensation for those people who have lost out, like they would have done if it was a service fault; two, we need to institute immediately proactive and routine cleaning of our insulators along the network; and three, we need a serious review of the adverse community outcomes that occurred—no phone service, no cool rooms around the entire peninsula on a hot day—to ensure that those things never happen again and that we have contingencies in place.