During widespread outages, our crews often juggle many power outages at the same time. If your power goes out, we'll have the right people on the job to get the lights back on as fast as we can. With a focus on safety, our control room considers a number of factors when prioritising the list of outages our crews work on.
Safety first
Above all, keeping our customers and the community safe is our priority. This means our crews may drop everything to attend to a life-threatening situation. When a powerline falls to the ground, or catches on fire, it can cause serious harm and even death.
Essential services
If the power goes out to essential services (like hospitals, nursing homes and pharmacies) and infrastructure (like water treatment plants), we'll get our crews working on these sites ASAP. This way, the community can continue to rely on these facilities while we work on repairing and restoring the rest of the network.
We fix the biggest outages before the smaller outages
We attend to jobs that will help the greatest number of customers first. The number of customers who are without power depends on where the fault is. If a large transmission line goes down, thousands of customers will be without power. If a piece of bark gets stuck on a line connected to your house, it will only affect the power supply of your house. Our crew will attend to the transmission line fault first, so that more people can get their power back on sooner.
Priorities can change during large weather events
The number of power outages during large weather events can change by the minute. This means your power outage could change from being the next in line to further down the queue depending on how urgent other works are. Prioritising is how we keep the community safe and restore power to the most amount of people as possible. We will always update Outage Tracker to keep you informed and send updates via SMS or email. If you want to change how we communicate with you during your unplanned power outage, visit Unplanned outage preference management.
If there has been a delay in getting your power back on, we thank you for your patience and understanding. For ways to manage an outage, visit our Outage Hub for tips and useful information and keep checking Outage Tracker for the latest updates on current power outages.