Northlanders narrowly missed another power outage this afternoon as Transpower moved to reconfigure the region’s power supply back to normal, following the collapse of a pylon last week.

Thousands in the region were left without power when a pylon holding Transpower’s two 220kv transmission lines (circuits) into Northland toppled over on a farm near Glorit, south of Wellsford, about 11am on Thursday.

Power was largely restored that night when the company increased the load on two of its 110kv circuits in the vicinity and asked people and businesses to reduce their electricity consumption.

Work began yesterday to transfer one of the 220kv lines from the fallen pylon onto a newly-erected temporary Lindsay pole but had to be abandoned due to bad weather in the afternoon that caused dangerous working conditions. However, there was sufficient supply to meet the weekend’s lesser demand through the circuits already in place.

Today Transpower advised there might be a momentary loss of power between 2pm and 2.30pm in some areas from Warkworth north as it resumed the work to re-liven the 220 kV circuit.

Transpower said it would work with local generators and its lines company partners Top Energy, Northpower and Vector to re-liven the circuit with as little impact on consumers as possible but couldn’t rule out momentary outages.

The company apologised for any inconvenience.

More information on the repair work would follow once the 220 kV circuit was re-livened, the company said.

Northpower’s general manager customer and community Rachel Wansbone said its consumers had conserved enough electricity to narrowly avoid the need for it to adjust its subscriber supply, which otherwise would have required it to have an outage between 2.15pm and 3pm.

Meanwhile the cause of the pylon collapsing remained a mystery.

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Transpower installed a temporary Lindsay pole this weekend to hold one of the 220kv circuit lines that was downed where a pylon fell over last week, south of Wellsford. Photo / Transpower

The Transpower spokesman would not be drawn on what might have happened. He said an investigation into the collapse was being undertaken in tandem with the repair work.

On Friday, Energy Minister Simeon Brown visited Northland to see the collapsed pylon and meet with mayors and emergency operators.

Simeon shared his concern for Northlanders still without power and impacted businesses: “It is unacceptable what happened yesterday; it just should not happen”.

Brown promised a full review. In addition to Transpower’s own investigation, he would ask the Electricity Authority to review the incident. He was also considering a Government review.

Meanwhile, power subscribers have left messages on Transpower’s Facebook page asking the company to instruct the power providers it supplies to give consumers a credit in acknowledgement of the outage.