The suburbs impacted include Padbury,Kingsley,Craigie,Carramar and Greenwood,plus suburbs between Eglinton and Seabird in Perth’s outer northern corridor.
Humid weather sparked power pole fires in Perth’s north on Monday morning.9News Perth
The mass outage comes after cloud cover prevented temperatures from dropping overnight,with the minimum hitting 21 degrees and some Perth areas experiencing 100 per cent humidity on Monday morning.
In a statement on Monday afternoon,Western Power said drizzly rain and humid weather had combined to cause about 70 pole top fires,with power outages impacting 47,000 customers at the peak of the outage.
Asset operations executive manager Zane Christmas said crews were working as quickly and safely as possible to address a “significant volume” of hazards,repair poles and restore power.
“All available crews are working to address the hazards. Once all hazards have been made safe,crews will be able to assess poles for replacement and start repair work,” he said.
“All planned work has been cancelled for today and all available resources have been assigned to the repair and restoration effort. We will continue to monitor the situation and assess the need to cancel planned works in some areas tomorrow.
“Our network operations team is also performing backfeeding and switching where possible,isolating damaged parts of the network,to restore customers on non-damaged parts of the network.”
Western Power warned pole top fires could occur during light drizzling rain or misty damp conditions,when a combination of dust and pollution builds up to create paths or “tracks” on the insulators.
“This tracking electricity can heat elements of the pole infrastructure to a point where they smoulder and burn,” a Western Power statement read
The power provider said each pole change could take up to eight hours,depending on the type of pole.
Areas with critical infrastructure such as hospitals and other emergency services will be prioritised for restoration.
Western Power is communicating directly with residents via SMS.
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