00:00August 2024, an unprecedented weather event that brought extreme, destructive winds and
00:09flooding. Electricity lines were toppled, leaving power out across parts of the state for weeks.
00:16Dairy farmer Cameron Wilson waited 10 days. As soon as I knew we didn't have power and
00:21I looked at all the outages across the state, I knew for a fact that we wouldn't get it for
00:26a couple of days. I didn't expect 10 days. He spent thousands of dollars hiring generators
00:33and was left frustrated by a lack of information from TAS Networks about when power would be restored.
00:39That's all we needed is an answer so we knew how we could prepare ourselves more.
00:43An independent review by Rhys Edwards has found TAS Networks was not equipped to properly respond
00:49to the scale of the disaster and that customers were not provided accurate and timely information.
00:55The key learning for us was we had to do better on the communications front and that's exactly
01:00what we're going to do now. TAS Networks says at the peak of the storm response there were 47,000
01:06customers without power across almost 230 outages. Across the outage period TAS Networks sent more
01:14than 150,000 text messages to customers and it received more than 40,000 calls.
01:20The government says it is working through the report's recommendations but that the community
01:26needs to build resilience. I think it's important for Tasmanians to acknowledge that we're seeing
01:32more frequent more severe natural disasters. TAS Networks says it ran its own internal review
01:37into the power outages and that many of Mr Edwards recommendations are already being implemented.
01:43It says it has taken what it learned from the incident into its response to more recent events
01:48such as the west coast summer bushfires.
Comments