Hungry birds and golfing gaffes top list of 2015's unusual power outages

One hungry eagle, plus a snoopy cat and a goofed-up golfer were among the most unusual reasons for power outages in 2015, according to a report released by Eaton Industries.

The Australian and New Zealand Blackout Tracker Annual Report 2015, compiled by the industrial manufacturer, showed blackouts affected almost one million people last year across Australia and New Zealand, causing a total of 174 power cuts, with 17,000 minutes (or 12 days) of power lost.

When an eagle dropped its kill — a sheep’s head — onto a powerline in Geraldton, WA, more than 2000 people lost their power for 15 hours.

And perhaps while trying to land an eagle^[1], a golfer short-circuited two 11,000-volt power cables when his club flew out of his hands and struck powerlines while teeing off. This unfortunate blunder also left around 2000 people powerless for approximately three hours.

Across the Tasman, another animal disaster was behind a power outage for 10,000 North Island customers when a cat climbed onto outdoor electrical switchgear in Tauranga. According to a New Zealand news report, the cat did not survive the incident.

However, it’s Mother Nature that causes the biggest impact when it comes to power cuts, with the most significant events the result of extreme weather conditions.

200,000 customers were left powerless in the biggest storm to hit New South Wales in a century, while earlier in the year a powerful cyclone in Queensland downed 1800 powerlines and knocked out power to 50,000 properties for three days.

Technical faults also caused major outages, including a control room issue in Lismore, NSW, that left 66,000 customers without power and an interconnector failure that left 45,000 customers in the dark from Sellicks Beach to the Barossa Valley in South Australia.

Gordon Makryllos, ANZ managing director at Eaton, said that while the stories behind some of the power cuts may make for an amusing anecdote after the event, an outage of any size causing downtime is disastrous.

“When systems are unavailable, businesses in particular suffer an irretrievable loss of productivity, revenue and, potentially, their reputation,” he said.

“Being prepared is key to protecting your power supply and taking steps to minimise any potential downtime should be an integral part every organisation’s risk management strategy.”

New Zealand’s North Island had the most trouble with 61 blackouts, followed by New South Wales (31) and Queensland (24). Victoria and Western Australia each recorded 13 blackouts, followed by Tasmania (4) and South Australia (3).

The Northern Territory was the only state or territory across the two nations that did not report any outages.

Image courtesy of Jennifer C. under CC-BY-2.0

[1] That’s a score of 2 under (less than) par for a hole.