UPDATE 5.45pm: Power has now been restored to businesses and offices in Hobart’s CBD.
TasNetworks issued a statement on social media saying crews had redirected supply to all customers affected by the outage. About 200 customers lost power for more than three-and-a-half hours during the blackout.
“We’d like to thank the community for their patience,” the post said.
EARLIER: An outage has cut power to hundreds of premises in the Hobart CBD.
Originally affecting more than 500 customers, about 280 are now affected.
Power is out to a large section of the CBD roughly bounded by Argyle, Brisbane, Murray and Liverpool Streets.
The State Library has been closed during the outage.
The disruption began shortly after 2pm and crews are onsite trying to trace the cause, TasNetworks said.
“About 280 customers are without power in the northern end of the Hobart CBD. “There’s a problem with the feeder coming from the North Hobart substation. Crews are investigating and will restore power as quickly as possible.
“We’re throwing major resources at the problem, but some customers may need to expect delays of up to a few hours.”
A spokesman for the Department of State Growth said three sets of traffic signals were inoperative as a result of the outage. Police were direct traffic at those locations.
Criterion Street Cafe manager Gemma Tsiaousis said her business had to close early because of the outage.
“We had to close as soon at the power went out at ten to two,” she said.
“I can’t run a cafe without hot water: the dishwasher can’t go, the lights in the toilets stopped working.
“I can’t serve people without running hot water.
“We had a full cafe. Fortunately everyone all got their lunch. We were lucky because we had our EFTPOS machine fully charged.
“It has been a bit of a time.
“Our chefs are moving all of our food … otherwise we would have lost thousands of dollars worth of stuff.
“We normally stay open until three and cook until three. We lost quite a bit of trade today.
“It has happened once before, a couple of years ago, but not for this long.”
Tasmanian Small Business Council CEO Robert Mallett was among those affected. He said his power came back on after an hour.
“It’s pretty devastating that these things happen because you lose business you got and for the rest of the day. It is very disruptive,” he said.
“It does cause chaos, on the other hand I don’t know when the last time the power went out with no prior warning. It is very, very rare.”
He said it was a good reminder of the need for people to be able to continue to use and accept cash, in addition to electronic payment methods.
Emma Hope was in the city to shop when she realised the power was off.
“I knew something was up when I started driving along Liverpool Street and there was a police officer directing traffic.
“There were police directing traffic at every set of lights. I thought it was just the lights were out.
“then I realised it was very dark in all of the shops. Most of them couldn’t take payments, they couldn’t open their cash registers.
“There would be a lot of money being lost.”
The outage struck as the temperature in the city soared to 35.1C – the hottest day this summer.
For the latest on power outages visit TasNetwork’s outages web page.
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