Powerful upgrade

Thursday, November 20, 2008

BREAKING NEWS: A spate of blackouts in Cairns CBD has forced Ergon Energy to fast-track a $1 million program to upgrade and replace underground power cables.

An Ergon spokesperson labelled the outages in the past fortnight as unacceptable and said crews were already working to fix the faults.

Businesses are outraged at the loss of trade in recent weeks, with almost 100 CBD shops blacked out last night, the second power cut in the city within 24 hours.

"The $1 million had been put in next year's budget but, in response to serveral underground cable faults over the last couple of weeks, we have decided to bring it into this year and do the work sooner rather than later," acting area operations manager Charlie Casa said.

"We will particularly be looking for older cable joints that could be replaced with new technology-type joints, places where sections of cable could be completely replaced to remove the need for joints altogether as well as general replacement of older cables where needed."

Full report in tomorrow's The Cairns Post

New plan: Ergon Energy has brought forward a power upgrade.

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