No electricity during heatwave

COCKBURN residents’ tempers were close to boiling point last week as households in many suburbs endured hours with no electricity for three consecutive days during a record heatwave.

The Gazette understands that parts of Spearwood, Munster, Coogee and Yangebup and possibly other suburbs, went without power for up to seven hours at a time between Tuesday and Thursday last week, days that recorded temperatures of 38.7, 41.1 and 41.9 degrees Celsius respectively.

West Ward councillor Carol Reeve-Fowkes said she had spoken to a number of residents who were “cheesed off” with the continual disruptions.

“I would imagine these people are pretty jaded that it’s happened three nights in a row,” she said.

“That’s a bit much for the residents to have to deal with.

“If you’re having food thawed and refrozen, then that’s not really a laughing matter any more.

“This is the metropolitan area; we should have a reliable and constant power supply.

“It’s just not good enough; we need to be asking why this is happening and what’s going on.”

Coogee resident Michelle (21), who did not want her surname to be published, returned home late in the afternoon on two days to find she had no power.

“It was just an inconvenience really – especially at a time when a majority of people would be coming home from work,” she said. “It would be nice to get a little bit of warning that this is going to happen.”

Western Power spokeswoman Alex Rogerson said the outages were caused by equipment failure from a lightning storm, but could not specify by the Gazette’s deadline whether this was the storm of the previous Friday.

“Outages were experienced in Spearwood, Yangebup, Munster and Coogee that affected approximately 5200 customers,” she said.

She said power cuts on Wednesday, January 25, were caused by “wind-borne debris” that caused power lines to fall along the rail line.

Police were called to direct traffic through closed boom gates at Spearwood’s Rockingham Road for a number of hours while Western Power repaired the power lines.

Ms Rogerson said no capacity-related power outages were likely to occur in the coming days as Western Power’s capacity was “fine,” but the company could not account for unexpected incidents such as wind-blown debris or weather events interrupting supply.