Cannonvale Substation “Explodes”

On Tuesday morning residents of Banksia Court in Cannonvale woke up to two loud explosions at around 7am.

Andrew McKay was listening to the radio with his wife at the time and after the explosions, the power immediately went off.

Heading outside to investigate the nearby substation, Andrew saw that it was on fire and immediately alerted Ergon Energy.

“I walked around the corner and could see that the doors on the substation had blown open and it was on fire,” he said.

“There was a lot of smoke coming out and we called Ergon, couldn’t get through but they had already identified the issue and were on their way.”

Within 30 minutes crews were attending to the outage which saw 565 customers in the nearby vicinity lose power.

Ergon restored electricity to more than 400 customers within an hour.

“Generation units from Mackay and Townsville were brought in so we could restore temporary supply to 146 customers while network repairs were underway,” said an Ergon spokesperson.

The cause of the explosion was a fault in the underground cable leading to a Padmount substation, which also needed to be repaired.

By coincidence, residents had been informed that there would be a routine power outage that same morning, but Ergon assures residents that the unexpected fault was not connected to the planned maintenance which subsequently had to be delayed.

By 3.15pm Andrew had power returned to his household.

“Ergon have performed magnificently,” he said.

“We now have a very large generator pumping out power, it was running by late afternoon, so we were able to keep things cold and keep the fridges running – it’s miraculous and they need to be highly commended.”

‍

‍

Caption:

1: Banksia Court resident Andrew McKay heard two loud explosions at 7am on Tuesday morning. Photo credit: Rachael Smith

2:  Equipment damage in the Padmount substation. Photo supplied

‍