Kamikaze fruit bats take out Katherine area power
1 July 2009
It’s four am in the morning, still dark and the Power and Water crews in Katherine are again patrolling powerlines and removing dead bats that have clustered around powerline insulators and caused an outage. Line crews have been called out 25 times since just last Thursday, with the Mataranka electricity feeder being the most affected by bats.
This morning, 30 kilometres down the line, the bats didn’t just cause a short circuit; they burnt a conductor to the ground from an insulator. The insulator and conductors both had to be replaced causing a longer than average outage.
Usually Power and Water equipment can sense an interruption and automatically restore power, in other cases a line crew has to patrol the line and remove them. Often getting into the site of a power pole can be a logistical challenge - how do you get a bucket truck weighing several tonnes across a sinkhole safely?
Attracted by abundant farm produce and native flowers, not only are the Mataranka and Fox Road powerlines especially prone to bat strikes, but Tindal Base is also inundated with bat populations. Power and Water crews are about to embark on clearing the hundred or so dead bats on the lines there and then checking on the lines weekly to get rid of the smell for residents.
In the meantime, Power and Water has put in place measures to minimise outages and make the system more resistant to short circuits caused by fruit bats by using longer insulators, insulated cross-arms and bat foils.