All Storm Outages Now Restored

While we still have some work to do with individual customers and ongoing challenges, this marks the completion of our official storm restoration efforts.

The scale and impact of recent storm damage has been unprecedented in recent memory. In just a few days, Tasmania was hit by several violent storm waves, as well as heavy rain and flooding - often making field conditions too hazardous to work in (especially at heights), and setting back existing restoration progress.

TasNetworks field crews and contractors have worked quickly, skilfully and tirelessly to restore power to almost 200,000 Tasmanians since storm damage began. That’s a prompt and impressive response for a recovery effort of this scale - unprecedented in living Tasmanian memory. The professionalism and commitment of our people has been outstanding.

Beyond replacing the many poles and wires that were damaged in storms, behind the scenes we have teams like the Fault Centre, which operates 24 hours a day with staff receiving, triaging and dispatching all fault jobs to crews in the field. They worked under extremely stressful conditions and were inundated with calls from the community and emergency services. At the peak of the storm response, where we saw 47, 000 customers off, their focus was to prioritise community, emergency services and field crew safety. They made critical decisions to ensure the imminent safety of all our customers, which was ensured 24 hours a day. The Customer Service Centre played a critical role in providing our customers with advice, reassurance and key information regarding outages and logging fault jobs that focussed on the immediate safety of our customers. They are the first point of contact for our direct connect customers and play a critical role. Whilst they are not seen by our customers in the field, their role is of critical importance throughout these types of events. Our people have said this event is unprecedented and rest assured they have worked tirelessly to ensure community safety.

Our field crews have been diligently supported by the hundreds of people working long hard hours to dispatch and direct them, answer calls from customers, respond to written enquiries, arrange generator access to protect critical services and farmers facing livestock losses, and protect our peoples’ safety.

In particular, we’re delighted to have navigated this unprecedented event without a single major injury to any of our people. That can never be taken for granted in operations of this length, scale and complexity. 

We feel deeply for Tasmanians who suffered many days and nights without power. Many endured extreme hardship and understandable anguish and frustration. Thank you so much for your resilience and understanding as our people have done everything possible to restore your power in these difficult circumstances.

In any widespread outage recovery, the bigger and simpler outages get fixed more quickly; the smaller, more complex and least accessible ones take a lot longer. While we had the required resources to confront them, the smaller outages that have lingered on for the past week involved some of the worst storm damage, most complex repairs, or most difficult faults to access.

Some of those outages needed careful helicopter work to reinstate power lines, as well as retrieving assets from dams and other waterways. We also faced flooded areas and blocked access roads. Thank you again for your patience and understanding in very harsh circumstances.

Some of the hardship endured by customers facing long periods without power was alleviated by the excellent work of the government and community agencies that joined us in this challenge. We’ve worked closely with the State Emergency Service, the Bureau of Meteorology, Tasmania Police, the Tasmania Fire Service, local government, the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and other government agencies to provide the outage intelligence needed to help support vulnerable Tasmanians. These are the people who worked so hard to knock on doors, make welfare calls, clear roads for us to access, operate refuge centres, and process grants that made hotel stays, fresh food and vital medication accessible and affordable to Tasmanians in need. We thank them for that incredible dedication. We aknowledge all the electrical contractors around the state who dropped everything for customers when they had an outage that required private works (i.e. UG mains, fascia repairs etc).

We must also pay thanks and tribute to the 22 interstate crew members from regional New South Wales to recently travelled to Tasmania to help us accelerate recovery and restoration efforts. It’s customary and deeply appreciated that Australians band together in times of need, and TasNetworks crews have previously travelled interstate to support bushfire and other recovery efforts. We hugely appreciate our New South Wales colleagues taking time away from their lives and families to support us and support Tasmanians.

Our response to this unprecedented challenge will not have been perfect or flawless. We routinely review our procedures and seek improvement after major events. This event will be no different. Talking and listening to affected customers will play a vital role in that review.

In particular, we want to acknowledge the challenges and frustration some customers have experienced around communication. TasNetworks seeks to update outage-affected customers by SMS whenever possible, with customers also having the option to call us on 132 004 for more details.

Particularly in these recent circumstances, we faced very long outages that went for long periods without any new information to report. We’ll consider the balance to be struck between staying regularly in contact, versus only doing so when there’s something new to report. The sheer volume of customers needing and expecting regular information about specific outages added to that challenge during this event.

We acknowledge that time estimates for outage restorations can be sometimes inaccurate. That’s because it's often simply not possible to put accurate estimates on complex outages that can be more complicated than first anticipated, and where our restoration efforts often face new and unexpected challenges. We have received feedbakc that our customers would prefer a general restoration estimate than none at all. But we’ll consider these issues in detail.

Thank you for your patience and understanding in the context of that unique challenge. We’ll review all our communication channels, including our website and social media information, to help optimise those systems for our customers.

TasNetworks’ mission is always to supply you with the most safe, reliable and affordable electricity possible. While safety always comes first, we carefully balance the need to be reliable and affordable in every resourcing and operational decision we make on your behalf.

Finally - thank you to you, the people of Tasmania, for your overwhelming support and understanding among much personal concern and frustration. The support and kindness that most of you show to our people is sincerely valued and appreciated at every level of our business. An ‘army’ of several hundred TasNetworks people went to battle for Tasmanians during this gruelling event. We really appreciate you having our back, and all being in it together.

Thank you.