Dairy farmers through large parts of the North Island are firing up generators, sharing milkings with neighbours or sitting tight as they wait for power to be restated today in the wake of ex Tropical Cyclone Dovi’s blast.
Powerco, the country’s second-largest lines operator, has reported Bay of Plenty and Taranaki the hardest hit, of these two regions BoP has 6400 out and 3000 in Taranaki.
Other rural areas supplied by the company and offline include Coromandel, Thames, South Waikato and Waihi with almost 3000 outages.
Powerco networks operation manager Scott Horniblow said the challenging conditions on Sunday had made tending to repairs inflicted by the high winds dangerous, meaning work could not commence until later afternoon and was now in full swing.
Taranaki Federated Farmers president and dairy farmer Mark Hooper said his supply had come back online late yesterday evening, but he knew of many farmers who had been unable to milk Monday morning, some with little prospects of repairs being made during Monday.
“I have had a call from farmers out the back of Inglewood who have multiple power poles down, with little sign yet that repair crews have been able to get to them,” Hooper said.
He said a series of weather events slamming Taranaki in recent years has meant more farmers have been prepared, with generator capacity in their farm dairies.
“Overall, we are still not sure at this point how many farmers will be affected by the outages,” he said.
The silver lining in the second major weather event to hit Taranaki in the past fortnight was that the rainfall in Dovi’s wake had not wreaked more havoc on the rural areas around Opunake, with many locals sourcing sand for sandbags in recent days.
“And it seems they have only seen a bit of surface flooding this time,” he said.
The follow-up rain had taken total rainfall to 150mm in places, providing a valuable pasture boost after January’s extreme dry weather.
Large tracts of Western Bay of Plenty appear likely to remain without power for much of Monday at least.
Feds president for BoP Daryl Jensen said it had taken him until Monday morning to get through to Trust Power’s call centre, with no estimated time of repair being provided.
While much of the rural BoP region remains without power, there was still some patchy connectivity and Jensen said neighbours were sharing milking sheds and resources, including generators.
“And in some cases we may not have all phases of power on sufficiently for machines to work,” Jenson said.
Extensive tree damage was spread throughout all the regions and local contractors are also reporting some intensive damage to near ripe maize crops.
In Waikato, Wel Networks was reporting extensive rural outages to 2300 customers across much of its supply region.
South Waikato farmer Chris Lewis said power supply had been sporadic through initial stages of the story, but local network company Waipa Networks had done a good job of getting electricity back for farm users.
“But our maize has taken a hammering and I am also eyeing generators for the farm dairy. We have had a few more outages than usual in the past 12 months,” Lewis said.
