Ministerial Statement

Minister thanks Energex workers

Mr Speaker, on behalf of the thousands of Queenslanders affected by the severe weather conditions over the past 72 hours I’d like to thank the dedicated staff of Energex for their hard work.

While most of us were sleeping in our warm and comfy beds, Energex crews were restoring power to South East Queensland in near cyclonic conditions.

I can report Energex dealt with the numerous outages very well – supply was quickly restored when outages occurred. Power interruptions were caused by such things as trees and branches falling across powerlines, winds breaking power poles and cars hitting power poles.

Since the storm started to affect South East Queensland – there have been almost 110,000 customers who lost power.

Energex has advised that power has been restored in all those homes and business, with restoration in less than 2 hours on average.

The largest number of customers who lost power at any one time was 30,499 on Tuesday night, mainly on the Sunshine Coast.

At any one time, there have been 120 Energex crews on the ground – getting to outages as soon as possible.

The hardest hit area has been the Sunshine Coast and Hinterland with around 43,000 customers losing power during this period. The Eastern Suburbs and Bay islands had 21,000 customers without power at one point in time and the Caboolture Redcliffe region had around 17,500 customers offline. The Gold Coast and Hinterland weren’t spared either with around 11,000 homes and businesses losing power.

All up, Energex has used 200 crews who have worked, on average, around 16 hours per person in wet and windy conditions. Even in these difficult conditions, safety remains the first priority.

Mr Speaker, I’d also like to point out there are plenty of people working behind the scenes. We must not forget the Energex staff at the Contact Centre and the Control Centre who also worked around the clock, with the call centre taking more than 11,000 calls throughout this wild weather.

During the storm season, Energex is the organisation that doesn’t sleep.

Mr Speaker, I’d like to urge everyone to spare a thought for the tireless Energex workers.