News
“Height of stupidity” adds to wild weekend
9 September 2019
While Ausgrid crews were responding to more than 700 hazards of fallen trees and powerlines thanks to the weekend’s wild weather, reckless vandals took to two power poles with chainsaws on Friday night.
The damage near Bloodwood Road at Fiddletown in Sydney’s north was discovered by Ausgrid emergency crews responding to calls of power outages in the area.
Ausgrid Chief Operating Officer Trevor Armstrong has condemned the behaviour.
“I can’t state enough just how dangerous and irresponsible this behaviour is.
“It is the height of stupidity to cut down a power pole carrying live powerlines, we are incredibly lucky nobody was killed or seriously injured,”
Trevor Armstrong, Chief Operating Officer
The poles were damaged on Friday night and crews had to cut away high voltage wires to make the site safe.
Two new poles were installed on Sunday and crews are still completing work to restring high voltage powerlines.
“This caused a significant amount of damage to the local network and I’d like to personally thank the crews who have worked so hard to rectify this needless damage so quickly.
“It is incredibly disappointing we need to spend resources on fixing unnecessary and criminal damage like this, especially on a weekend when our emergency crews were already busy responding to wind damage,” he said.
Two new poles were installed on Sunday and crews are still completing work to restring high voltage powerlines.
“This caused a significant amount of damage to the local network and I’d like to personally thank the crews who have worked so hard to rectify this needless damage so quickly.
“It is incredibly disappointing we need to spend resources on fixing unnecessary and criminal damage like this, especially on a weekend when our emergency crews were already busy responding to wind damage,” he said.