By Dominique Tassell
Confusion reigns over the cause of power outages which hit hundreds of residents across Stanthorpe over the past month.
Ergon Energy has stated that the recent outages were not planned, however Stanthorpe businesses have stated they received notice of them.
Just a few of the “800 odd customers” affected by the outage on Sunday 1 August were many Stanthorpe businesses, who were forced to close for the day.
Mitre 10 had a sign outside on the Saturday stating that they would be closed for the day on the Sunday.
They posted on Facebook stating that “we can’t believe it is happening again“.
They stated they would be closed “due to Ergon having to cut the power“.
“Sorry for any inconvenience but this is completely out of our control“.
Mitre 10 also posted on 9 July stating that “due to unforeseen circumstances Stanthorpe Mitre 10 will be closed this Sunday 11th July“.
Foxy’s Bakery closed on Sunday 1 August as well.
The bakery posted on Facebook on 28 July, stating that they would closed “due to electricity outage/maintenance by Ergon Energy“.
They also posted about the outage on Sunday 11 July, posting once on 7 July and again on 10 July.
IGA reportedly had a generator on hand last week, telling customers walking in at 8:30am that the generator should be working by the time they got to the checkout.
Multiple businesses told this newspaper that they received notice of the outage, and posted on social media alerting their customers prior to the outage.
Yet a representative of Ergon Energy stated that the outages were not planned and were the result of equipment faults.
Ergon Energy stated that the outage lasted for two hours, and that the other outages were “quite small” and only affected less than 40 customers each.
But given the confusion about whether the outages were planned, who they affected and when might also be up for question.
