VIDEO: Broken Hill residents still without reliable power

DANA MORSE, REPORTER: The lights may be on, but residents of Broken Hill still feel in the dark.

They’ve spent two weeks questioning why their city has been left without reliable power.

RUSSELL MILLER, MINING CONTRACTOR:  If we had a pretty emotive picture of a flood or a fire, people would care more. 

DANA MORSE: Contractor Russell Miller is an underground truck driver at one of the local mines.

It's been a fortnight since the outage halted operations, and he was stood down without pay.

RUSSELL MILLER:  I've been told that I'll be stood down for probably five weeks, to be prepared for that. It could be a little bit longer. It could be a week shorter, but $1,500 a week, that's what it cost me. 

DANA MORSE:  The mines are the main employer here, with 600 people out of work until the region is reconnected to the grid.

RUSSELL MILLER:  There are 600 other workers who are being stood down through no fault of their own because a national supplier of energy can't do their job property. 

DANA MORSE:  The city relies on the employment and income generated by the mines. 

TOM KENNEDY, BROKEN HILL MAYOR:  Look, the mines are a big part of Broken Hill economy. So, they could be losing as much as $1.5 million per day, or $1.5 million per day that's not going into the Broken Hill economy.

DANA MORSE:  A single power line hundreds of kilometres long supplies Broken Hill’s electricity.

A massive storm on October 17th brought down seven of its supporting transmission towers, leaving around 20,000 people without power.

One of the city’s two backup generators wasn’t operating, and the other failed.

TOM KENNEDY:  There was only one generator that was put under extreme amount of load. Once that was put under load, that also tripped out and we're with a situation where some people in town were without power for 48 hours, others just over 24 hours. 

So it was really lack of maintenance on generators that are worth probably $50 million each.

DANA MORSE:  Temporary transmission towers have been built, and a patchwork of generators is powering the region. 

But Mayor Kennedy believes Transgrid, which operates the network, failed to do its job.

TOM KENNEDY:  We're very angry with the management of Transgrid, particularly those making the decisions. Without a doubt they, for me, without a doubt, they made the decision not to maintain the generator to save money. And it's put our, put our livelihoods at risk, and it's put Broken Hill to some considerable risk in general.

DANA MORSE:  Transgrid says its backup generators are tested every two months to make sure they’re working.

MARIE JORDAN, TRANSGRID: Maintenance was not neglected at a cost cutting measure.

DANA MORSE:  Marie Jordan manages the network and says the second generator wasn’t operational after a safety issue was found during an inspection in September.

She conceded Transgrid is required to provide backup power, but the risks of relying on one generator were weighed up.

MARIE JORDAN:  When we take a look at the generation we have on site and look at probability of things occurring, we try and make the best call and the right call for the cost to the consumers.

DANA MORSE:  There are calls from the community for compensation from Transgrid. 

MARIE JORDAN:  Right now, we're focused on emergency operations and repair. We want to get the secure solution in to support the generators. 

After that time, we will begin the process working with the government, with Essential Energy, and we will determine what we will be doing on compensation for those losses.

DANA MORSE:  This cafe estimates it lost up to $30,000 in stock and revenue during the outage.

State and federal regulators are now investigating whether the Transgrid breached its obligations or license requirements.

JONATHAN COPPEL, IPART INVESTIGATOR:  There are many questions, questions that we want to get to the bottom of to understand more clearly the facts that led to the power outage.

DANA MORSE:  Jonathan Coppel works for the New South Wales regulator and has been meeting with key parties.

JONATHAN COPPEL:  We didn’t receive any notification to say that one of the backup generators was not operating and they’ve been different messages in relation to when it went down exactly and so we need to better understand that, and we’ll be requiring maintenance logs from Transgrid to help us piece together what actually happened.

DANA MORSE:  Fines for any breaches could range from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions. 

It’s estimated the New South Wales investigation will be complete in six weeks.

JONATHAN COPPEL: Hopefully when we develop our report, and we understand those facts we’ll be able to recommend whether there are things that can change to avoid such an outage repeating itself in Broken Hill or elsewhere.

DANA MORSE:  Transgrid says power could be fully restored by the weekend, but it could be weeks before businesses here return to normal operations.

Gerry Leaver’s engineering workshop gets most of its business from the mines.

GERRY LEAVER, TOP GEAR ENGINEERING:  I’d envisage it’ll be another couple of weeks before any work may start flowing from there, so you’re looking at four or five weeks in total without any fresh work coming in from the mining sector. 

DANA MORSE:  He’s keeping his workers doing what they can for now. 

GERRY LEAVER:  It’s pretty serious, it’s a lot of, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars really go up in smoke in wages without a return and loss of income. 

The bills still roll on so it’s a challenge, but we’ll push through it, we’ll try and make the most of it, cleaning up, and moving machines and servicing equipment and that sort of thing.