Update on flood levels at Castlemaine Zone Substation

Update

As flood levels dropped near our Castlemaine zone substation last night, we were able to safely re-energise the site and restore power to homes and businesses. This happened around 11pm last night.

We thank everyone for their understanding and patience during this outage.

We will continue to monitor water levels around the zone substation.

Over recent days, we have been monitoring Victoria’s weather conditions and have taken proactive steps to protect critical power assets in regions at risk of flooding. These steps have included sandbagging, raising equipment and using pumps to keep water out.

Despite these actions, rising flood waters have reached a level at our Castlemaine zone substation that makes it unsafe to keep power on at the site. We have been unable to keep water out of our control room and as a result we have de-energised the substation.

We have taken this step to reduce the safety risk to emergency services and our employees and to minimise long term damage as much as possible in the circumstances. The zone substation supplies about 12,500 homes and businesses in the Castlemaine region.

We have been able to continue providing power to about 2,600 customers connected to the zone substation by supplying them via other parts of our network.

About 9,800 customers will remain off power until it is safe for us to re-energise the site.

We know this is a difficult situation for the local community and we thank them for their patience during this time.

We will continue monitoring the flood levels and will restore power once they have reduced to a level that is no longer unsafe.

We will keep you updated on the restoration time via our website and SMS.

Advice on what to do if you are impacted by flooding is available here.