A tree blown over at Wellington Cathedral of St Paul on as gales hammered the capital on 1 May 2025. Photo: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
There are still 286 households without power across Wellington since the storm that tore down numerous trees and power lines last week.
The outages are down from a total of 8000 in the region following a rare "threat to life" warning with the strongest wind in over a decade last Thursday.
Speaking to Morning Report on Monday, Wellington Electricity chief executive Greg Skelton said restoration of the high-voltage network had taken priority over the low-voltage network and individual households.
Have you been affected? Share your stories and pictures with us at: hamish.cardwell@rnz.co.nz
Skelton said 142 jobs were logged for Monday, and the remaining 146 jobs were logged for Tuesday.
However, there has been frustration among some residents about a lack of communication from Wellington Electricity since Thursday.
Brooklyn resident Sean Keaney told Morning Report he had been ignored by both his retailer and Wellington Electricity.
He had received only one phone call from Wellington Electricity to confirm whether his house was without power on Friday, and one text message late on Sunday night which said his house had been identified as being without power.
"You just end up in a merry-go-round," Keaney said.
"The retailer says 'Call the lines company.' And the lines company says 'Call the retailer'. You call the retailer, they say 'All we do is log it and report it - we can't do anything else for you'. You call the lines company, they say 'We can't tell you anything - we don't know - there's no ETA'.
"When I asked if I could speak to someone else to kind of escalate the issue ... [they] said to me 'no, they don't want to talk to you. You can make a complaint when this is all resolved'."
Keaney said his was the only house on his street without power and an electrician had confirmed the problem was at the pole.
He said updates on Wellington Electricity's website were only for areas that affected 10 or more households.
Gales forced flights to be cancelled, toppled trees, and lifted roofing iron. Photo: RNZ/Reece Baker
'Painful' lack of comms
A neighbour of a Miramar woman who had been without power since Friday echoed what Keaney said.
The neighbour, who wished to remain anonymous, said the woman had not heard anything from Wellington Electricity and her property did not even appear on a map of power outages on Wellington Electricity's website.
"I said to her, 'Have you been ringing?' She said, 'It's not worth ringing them. They don't answer.'"
Meanwhile, a Brooklyn resident said they had called Wellington Electricity every day since their power went out on Thursday night. They said the first response they received was a text message with a "vague update" around 10.40pm on Sunday.
"The lack of communication has been painful. We have a 85-year-old in the house. We would have moved out if I had known earlier."
They said their biggest issue was that Wellington Electricity had not sent a text message earlier.
"They have everyone's number. All they had to say was, 'We will be tackling critical, big areas, and then getting to individual ones like you. ETA is Tuesday at this stage.' We would have made plans."
However, Skelton defended the response of Wellington Electricity, and told Morning Report it had been "fantastic".
"We can't put people up repairing overhead line faults in 160km/h winds, so we really had to sequence the patrolling and making sure we had good plans in place for getting the 8000 customers back on through high-voltage faults, and then we can sequence the low-voltage customers - 800, down to 500, down to the last 300 in the next two days."
He said Wellington Electricity had contacted a number of customers.
Meanwhile, Kiwirail said it is still trying to clear a backlog of freight following "several days" of cancelled Cook Strait sailings.
Interislander crossings were cancelled last week due to the severe weather.
Additional sailings were put on when operations resumed on Saturday.
In a statement on Monday, Kiwirail said it expects to have resolved the freight backlog by Tuesday night.
"The severe weather system impacted all Cook Strait sailings for several days, leading to a backlog of freight," a spokesperson said.
"We expect to have this resolved within the next 36 hours.
"We thank all those affected for their patience."
