Down like dominoes

As people in Quebec and Eastern Ontario did earlier this year, residents of New Zealand's largest city are struggling to cope with the collapse of their power supply

Associated Press - March 16, 1998
By Peter James Spielmann

AUCKLAND - DELA PERATIAKI and Allan McPhee came home from a few summery days in the country to trudge up five dark flights of stairs and discover their powerless freezer had become a tomb of reeking meat, with a puddle spreading underneath from melting ice.

Almost three weeks later, things are looking up. They have hot water for showers in the morning and lights in the evening and most of the weekend. The elevator works sporadically. But some neighbours in their nine-storey building have piled bags of rotting garbage in the halls. Peratiaki and McPhee can't haul it down the stairs, and they fear being trapped in the elevator with their nasty cargo.

Spoiling food, risky elevators and sanitation challenges are just some of the crises and inconveniences crippling the core of New Zealand's largest city since Feb. 20 when its fourth and last power cable failed.

The colossal failure left 8,000 businesses and 5,000 residents without bank machines, cash registers, burglar alarms, gasoline pumps, lights and air-conditioning in the hottest summer on record. Scores of diesel-fuelled generators have restored some of the juice but created a new blight: clouds of choking fumes.

Signs posted last week in the elevators at the Auckland Institute of Technology warned, ``Please do not get out at Level One due to severe diesel fumes.''

Auckland's 120-square-block downtown is staggering back to life this week with two of the four failed cables tenderly providing 40 per cent of their capacity. More power is coming from a cargo ship, the Union Rotorua, hooked to the city grid with generator cables.

But ``we definitely don't have enough supply to handle a normal, hot day peak,'' said Patrick Strange, planning director for Mercury Energy, the now-reviled electrical utility.

A new cable tunnel to replace the old power lines was already under construction, but that won't be finished for 18 months. Mercury says the only way to restore full power in the short run is to rig an overhead cable from a suburban substation. Poles started going into the ground Sunday, but Mercury says the job may take nine more weeks, extending the power shortage well into May.

The four cables went down like dominoes: One on Jan. 22, the second Feb. 9, the last two Feb. 19 and 20.

Initial blame fell on the hot, sticky weather and demand for air conditioning - February was the hottest month since New Zealand began keeping records in the 1880s. Auckland's typical summer highs average 23 degrees Celsius. This summer, daily temperatures have hovered around 27C. On Feb. 2, one northwest suburb recorded 33C.

And the city has grown faster than its power system. The two cables that failed first were laid some 50 years ago, with the city population at less than 700,000. The two others were installed 20 years ago, when the population had expanded to 801,000. Auckland has 1.2 million people today.

When the last power vanished that Friday at 5 p.m., traffic lights went dark at rush hour and elevators stopped between floors, trapping people as long as six hours.

Surgeons in three operating rooms at Auckland Hospital stood in darkness, scalpels in hand, until generators kicked in and restored their lights 20 minutes later.

With the power still out at the beginning of the next work week, office people coped. They walked up and down 30 storeys in Auckland's tallest buildings. Without air conditioning, they shuffled barefoot through airless offices turned into highrise saunas. Managers roamed offices with thermometers: Health and safety rules declare people must be sent home if interior temperatures reach 32C.

Shops held sales - by candlelight - and made change out of shoe boxes. But with 80,000 daily commuters mostly absent, the blackout ``turned this area into a ghost town,'' said boutique owner Michelle Dunsmuir, 34.

Dunsmuir served just one customer a day over nine days until shutting her door. ``From an average turnover of $2,080 a week, I took in just $30 the whole week,'' she said.

By Tuesday of last week, the 12th day of the outage, most stores had closed, and offices had either shut or relocated.

``We were working without air conditioning, no toilet water,'' said Hideki Shimazaki, senior consul at the Japanese Consulate, which moved into a suite at the generator-powered Carlton Hotel.

The city's Small Business Emergency Relief Centre is handling 90 hardship cases a day, giving each afflicted shopkeeper a maximum of $1,800 in emergency aid.

``People are desperate, distressed and embarrassed, or resigned to it all,'' manager Jo Wiggins said. ``They're small traders trying to survive, and some of them won't survive.''

``Our bubble of credibility has well and truly burst,'' said Don Turkington, an investment banker and chief executive of Cavill White Securities. ``This will hurt us for a very, very long time to come. It's inconceivable Wall Street could ever be out of power. If that happened, the power companies feeding New York would be sued out of existence.''

Mercury Energy faces legal action. An Australian law firm says it is preparing to sue the utility on behalf of 600 downtown businesses. The businesses are still tallying their losses - last week, they said they were collectively losing at least $60 million a week - and said they would seek damages in the ``hundreds of millions.''

Government help has been minimal. Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, a hardline fiscal conservative, had just fended off ranchers' and farmers' appeals for assistance after a severe summer drought.

She recently wished businesses well in their lawsuit, because the only help they will get from the national government is an investigation.

Not all businesses, of course, are going under. At Bottles on Elliot, a wine and liquor store, proprietor Michael Barnes said he's doing better than other shops, retaining about 40 per cent of his usual daily trade. Most have lost at least half their trade, some up to 85 per cent.

Of his customers, he said, ``Maybe they're drowning their sorrows.''

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