Snake causes power outage at Manton, Livingston and Acacia areas

20 Dec 2007

By 7.00pm, electricity to 60% of residents had been restored and by 10.18 pm only Acacia Hills, Colton Park and Old Bynoe Road customers were still without power as crews continued to investigate the source of the outage.

Eight crew, in six vehicles covered more than 200 kilometres backtracking between isolation switches and inspecting section by section, approx. 2,000 power poles covering a large area between McMinns Road west, east to the end of Townend Road, west to Livingston Road and as far south as Acacia store.

During patrol of the lines, crews identified a number of possible causes such as tree branches across lines and a cracked insulator.  Each of these possible causes was progressively eliminated until at 1.00am, the fault had been isolated to one specific section of Old Bynoe Road.

At 2.37 am crews found a snake, 10 metres up, on top of a set of High voltage fuses, acting as a bridge and shorting circuiting across 3 phases. 

Power and Water Acting General Manager, Networks, Trevor Allwright said,

“The crews were out in the dark and the rain and yet still managed to find the proverbial ‘needle in a haystack’, a snake. The snake, having caused the fault, was located on the crossarm at the pole top.

“Bats causing havoc on the line are much easier to see and luckily we only find snakes up there on average about once a year across the Territory.  It was a particularly difficult job last night, as you can’t afford to guess where the fault may have originated. It is necessary to be systematic when locating High Voltage faults and unfortunately, on this occasion, it was located on a spur line close to the end of the feeder.

We are continually upgrading and maintaining High Voltage feeders to reduce the impact of animals on supply reliability, such as insulator replacement, fibreglass cross arms, foilers to stop fruit bats and an extensive tree trimming program as trees are still the major cause of power outages.”