Sarah Herrmann, Yorke Peninsula Country Times
Moonta was hit by a particularly unfortunate power outage on Easter Monday, April 1, while a large part of northern Yorke Peninsula was also off the grid on Tuesday, March 26, with small hospitality businesses taking a hit.
A faulty insulator caused a momentary outage for 1500 people in Moonta and surrounds around 5.30pm, while 127 customers were affected for up to 105 minutes until 7.15pm on April 1, SA Power Networks spokesperson Paul Roberts said.
Moonta restaurant Capella’s owner Kirby Carter said the outage couldn’t have happened at a worse time with lots of dinner reservations for the public holiday.
“We had probably $500 worth of takeaway orders cancelled for refunds, and then we had a table of 26 booked in at 6pm that left us to go to Port Hughes,” Ms Carter said.
“We cancelled about another $1000 worth of tables, probably 50 people.
“We would’ve lost about $2500 in sales and then it was double time for wages and we had wait staff just standing around waiting.”
The March 26 outage had 1500 customers without power from Bute in the north to Port Wakefield in the east, Sunnyvale in the south and the edge of Kadina in the west beginning at 6.50am.
A partial restoration at 1.30pm left 400 customers out around Kulpara, Port Wakefield and Proof Range until 3pm.
“There was an equipment fault on the 33,000 volt Hummocks to Port Wakefield line, which would’ve affected lines that fed off that,” Mr Roberts said.
Pasky Grab & Go Deli owner Sheree Moroney said the outage created ‘absolute chaos’ for her business.
“We cater and we had our cold room on with all of our meals for the elderly that we deliver to the Copper Coast and we had to unload it with ice bricks and ring all of our clients and tell them we’d have to come early,” Ms Moroney said.
Ms Moroney said she also had to scramble to keep the deli’s bakery delivery cold with ice, but still lost some products due to concern over lack of refrigeration.
Bute Corner Store owner Jacinta Treloar said, while her products were able to remain refrigerated thanks to a generator, her business ceased to operate on Wednesday morning with no way to power the till.
“We had to turn all our customers away, and most takings are usually made before 2pm,” she said
This article appeared in Yorke Peninsula Country Times, 3 April 2024.
