Lives have been put at risk twice in two weeks after vandals switched power off to 2000 Prospect households.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
TasNetworks ground services team leader Steve Sergent said medical customers on life support and CPAP machines had been put in danger due to the unscheduled power outages caused by a substation being vandalised.
“We need to go through the process where we need to tell them we’re turning the power off and they can make provisions for that,” Mr Sergent said.
And the vandals themselves are putting their own lives at risk.
“They have been very lucky. We’ve got cables in some of these substations up to 22,000 volts and if they get themselves hooked up in those there’s no two ways about it; they will die,” he said.
“It’s an actual danger to these guys.”
TasNetworks staff do not know which implements are being used to break into the substation, but the locking mechanism has been prised, or torn, open to gain entry and then the switches flicked off.
“Some of them are actually physical switches. It feels like it does nothing here, but at the end of where that switch runs, it’s turning all the power off,” Mr Sergent said.
TasNetworks regional manager David Cornelius said he thought the vandals probably did not understand the extent of what they were doing.
“They’re just looking at switches and turning them off,” Mr Cornelius said.
“It’s just like it’s a dare.”
This is a prank they could easily go wrong.
“We are obviously concerned about our customers,” he said.
“It’s only a matter of time before someone seriously gets hurt.”
Mr Sergent said the TasNetworks fault centre had received a flurry of phone calls twice, reporting power outages in the same area, but it was initially difficult to isolate the problem.
“Our fault centre tries to bring that down to an event and then when they see all these people all in a line who are saying they’ve got no power, we’ve got no events from police, fire or ambulance to say a car has hit a pole, or a car has taken out a building, so we can’t marry it up,” he said.
“Then they get to the substation and see the door has been jacked open and all the power is off in there.”
These acts of vandalism come after vandals stole TasNetworks infrastructure in southern Tasmania.
“This one is a bit more painful because they are actually turning customers off,” Mr Cornelius said.
“I reckon the people at Prospect would be getting pretty [annoyed], because they are losing their power,” he said.