Strong winds in Southern Tasmania have revealed that Aurora Energy’s emergency response communications system is unable to handle widespread power outages.
At first, gusts of wind up to 130 kilometres an hour in Southern Tasmania sent branches and trees falling onto power lines. Aurora Energy, the electricity retailer, urged customers to assume that fallen lines were live and report outages via to their 13 2004 phone line.
They did, but Aurora’s faults reporting line wasn’t up to the job. At first, it played a recorded message listing all the known outages by suburb, but when it got to the time to report a fault, the line dropped out. A little while later, not even the recorded message would play. The system had crashed entirely.
Aurora Energy’s website was little better. The “Current Power Outages” page was hopelessly out of date. As I write, five hours after the power first went off, Aurora’s website still records no fault in South Hobart.
Problems with reporting faults, both before Aurora’s fault line crashed and after it was nominally restored, were noted in comments posted to the retailer’s Twitter account. Twitter users also noted the lack of up-to-date information on the company’s website.
While strong winds are common in Tasmania, the inadequacy of Aurora’s emergency management communication systems is staggering.
Aurora, you have a big problem.
