High-voltage power lines. Photo: 123RF
A North Canterbury lines company says it could be several more days before all customers have power restored as fresh weather warnings are issued for parts of the South Island.
MetService warnings are currently in place with forecasts for snow, rain and wind, which might complicate restoring power to some areas.
The Canterbury High Country can expect more strong winds, with Nor-west winds becoming severe gales in exposed places from 1am on Tuesday.
Crews are still working to restore supply to thousands of homes including in Hurunui and Waimakariri, after the region was battered by damaging winds, which left 20,000 properties across Canterbury without power, over the weekend.
As of Monday afternoon, about 1500 properties in North Canterbury and 39 Orion households further south are still without power.
Hurunui District mayor Marie Black said people seemed to be coping with the outage well, but the council could offer support if needed.
Black was encouraging people to get in touch with the council if they needed help as some homes were into a third day with no power.
She said a huge number of road signs were down, and people should be cautious on the roads.
Omihi School principal and Greta Valley resident Maree Lucas has been without power since Saturday afternoon.
The lack of water and power outage meant the school had to shut on Monday. Lucas said she was not sure when they would be able to re-open.
If power was still not back by Tuesday, they would look at other avenues, such as a generator, to get the school open.
Lucas was trying to get a generator for home too.
"We're after a generator to save the meat in our freezer, which is full. That's the main issue now.
"Also I've headed into Rangiora to work to use the Wi-Fi and get power to charge my laptop, because we've got no power at home either. There are worse things that can happen. We're hoping it'll come back on in the next day or so."
Live wire warnings
MainPower said it was difficult to confirm when power would be restored to everyone due to the scale of faults and access issues.
It reminded people to treat all lines as live, as power could be restored at any time.
Orion general manager Steve MacDonald expected all the properties to be reconnected by the end of the day.
Once all customers in its area had supply back, Orion would send staff to help restore the North Canterbury network, he said.
MacDonald said almost all the outages had resulted from trees falling on powerlines. If people came across downed power lines, they should assume they were live, he said.
Gusts of between 150 and 200km/h were recorded on Saturday in exposed areas, lifting roofs, toppling trees and bringing down power lines, as an active trough moved east across the country on Sunday.
More bad weather is on the way, as other areas are likely to see heavy rain including across Westland and Tasman, with up to 180 millimetres of rain in the Westland ranges.
From tomorrow, the mountain passes and Mackenzie Basin could see some snow fall, and Tasman and the headwaters of the Canterbury lakes are forecast to have heavy rain.
