"If it had happened in a large city, like Auckland, there would have been national news coverage and a real outcry," Waitaki Power Trust chairwoman Helen Brookes said this week.
The 90-minute outage was eventually traced to a fault in a Transpower substation feeding Network Waitaki's substation at Weston, near Oamaru.
The trust owns Network Waitaki on behalf of consumers and is angry about the 1-hour, 25-minute power cut which affected about 10,000 consumers from Shag Point to the Waitaki River and inland to Duntroon.
Transpower initially said the fault was at Network Waitaki's Weston substation but later identified the fault was in its own substation. That delayed fixing the problem far longer than necessary.
Network Waitaki's chief executive, Graeme Clark, said if Transpower had identified the source of the fault immediately, electricity could have been back on within minutes.
Transpower apologised for any inconvenience caused by the outage, but Dr Brookes said "inconvenience" was an understatement.
"Why did Transpower plan maintenance to switch over electricity at a quarter to six on a Friday night in the middle of winter when it's dark outside and cold," Dr Brookes asked.
Elderly people living alone - and Oamaru had a much higher percentage than the national average - were without electricity for cooking and heating. Some went to bed early to keep warm.
Businesses in Oamaru had shoppers who came to town on a Friday evening.
"Businesses I've spoken to have said that, across the whole of Oamaru, losses would be in the many, many tens of thousands of dollars," she said.
Some outlets had to close. Electric fences on farms went off and stock got out into valuable winter feed.
Apologising for "inconvenience" was an insult given the disruption the power outage had caused.
People on small, rural lines networks similar to Network Waitaki did not act in the same way as people in large centres, and Transpower needed to take that into account when doing work on its network.
The trust would write to Transpower so it understood what it was like in a predominantly rural area to be without electricity at that time of day in winter, on one of the busiest retail shopping days of the week.
