Civil Defence coordination continues

The Auckland Emergency Coordination Centre remains activated in response to the power outage affecting parts of the Eastern suburbs of Auckland.

Approximately 18,000 customers remain without power. Affected areas include parts of Remuera, St Johns/Meadowbank, Mt Wellington, Sylvia Park and parts of St Heliers.

Vector requests customers in nearby suburbs conserve power so that more neighbouring customers can be reconnected. Vector has worked through the night on affected cables and will have more certainty of estimated restoration times later today.

Nine road intersections remain without power; four of these are manned by Police traffic control.

Bus and rail services are generally running without disruption, although four rail stations (Orakei, Sylvia Park, Glen Innes and Meadowbank) have no power.

A number of cell phone sites are still down due to the outage. At 9am, Spark had 17 cell sites down but expects the majority of these to be back up and running by 1pm. Vodafone has 19 cell phone sites down.

All hospitals are now on mains power. Health services have coordinated residential care teams working in affected areas to help those who are most vulnerable.

With the power outage extending beyond 24 hours, Auckland Civil Defence is requesting that businesses and residents be vigilant with food that has defrosted or refrozen.

Westerly winds are expected to be gusty in Auckland later today. Between 11am and 6pm, MetService expect that winds in exposed parts of the region could gust up to 100 km/hr. These winds are not expected to cause widespread damage but it is possible there could be localised power outages and fallen trees could during the afternoon.

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