• Risk known and “managed”
• Risks included fatality
• Similar sites right through the country

The complacent state of NZ’s approach to health and safety is on full display in the case of the national grid outage which left a chunk of Auckland and all parts north without electricity last Thursday. This is the situation:

In submissions to the Electricity Commission hearings on the North Auckland and Northland transmission upgrade, a completely human-induced risk was identified at the site where the outage occurred, this risk was said to be “managed,” but at worst it could have been fatal. The upgrade is now going ahead, costing around $475m and is cited widely as “the answer” to the type of grid weaknesses exposed last week.

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This weakness involved Transpower’s high voltage lines drooping through the Metroport shipping container handling yard in South Auckland at a height lower than the height containers are stacked there. Forklift drivers were instructed to operate parallel to the lines, but in the end, it looks like an accident waiting to happen.

Transpower is treating the issue as just another example of the problems created by “underbuild” on the grid, a risk which will be avoided when the NAaN project is in place because Transpower is buying a land corridor which will allow no underbuilding. Since the Metroport risk was known, Transpower CEO Patrick Strange told NZ Energy & Environment Business Week “in some ways, it probably should have been one of the lower risks.” Transpower’s Kieran Devine says the Metroport site risk was among the most significant raised in hearings on the NAaN proposal, but the risk was being managed.

Strange says there are similar sites “all over the country” where Transpower’s high voltage lines are overlapping the operational space used by underbuilt businesses. On top of this, home and industrial fires, vehicle accidents, and various kinds of vandalism all represent constant threats to the grid which are inherently difficult to manage. While Transpower consistently opposes underbuilding in resource consent hearings, land use regulation rests with local governments and is out of the national grid operator’s control, says Strange. Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee was among those quick to blame the EC for failing to approve the NAaN upgrade earlier, but NZ Energy & Environment Business Week says the risk which took out homes and businesses, including the Marsden Point oil refinery, didn’t need a $475m upgrade to fix.

Here was an example of a cluster of risks both life-threatening and capable of causing social and economic disruption on a grand scale, yet these catastrophic risks were managed in such a way as to leave open huge potential for human error by making forklift operators responsible for never hitting the wires. At this stage, the Dept of Labour confirms it “is making inquiries to identify what follow up action might be appropriate.”

Straight-talking as always, Strange is irritated at suggestions there was anything special about the Metroport site, and says the fact another part of the grid was out of action for maintenance at the time was also probably irrelevant. An accident of this magnitude could have been expected to knock out the other grid circuit running through central Auckland. It would definitely have taken out Genesis’s proposed gas-fired plant at Rodney, as even the Ngawha geothermal station in the Far North tripped because of the extreme voltages created by the collision of container, forklift and the 220Kv line.

NZ Energy & Environment Business Week says this accident, with its enormous social and economic cost, let alone the potential for loss of life, should have been far better handled. Just who is responsible is not clear - Auckland local Govt? Transpower? Metroport? Govt safety regulators? And this may be the problem. Everyone seems to see this as either someone else’s issue, just one of those things, or something which will only be fixed when a new cable is in place.

Yet what it really needs is some commonsense when it comes to operating in the same space as high voltage power lines. It beggars belief this could ever be regarded as safe practice in the health and safety-conscious environment which constantly warns stairs are slippery and jugs can be hot. Until the penny drops there is a real health and safety issue at the heart of this, it must only be a matter of time before something similar happens again, and maybe next time someone will die.

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