POWER FAILURE.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20827, 10 April 1933, Page 10

POWER FAILURE.

TRAMS HELD UP. Trams were held up in the city for a quarter of an hour on Saturday afternoon through a fault in the Public Works Department's electric sub-station at Addington. The power went off at 4.15 p.m., and the Diesel stand-by plant at Lyttelton came into operation 15 minutes later. The fault was rectified by 5.8 p.m. Mr R. G. Mac Gibbon, district electrical engineer for the depart ment, stated that the auxiliary busbars of the iron-clad gear had failed, putting all the city feeders out of action. The feeders could not be brought into action again until the main bus-bars immediately underneath the damaged ones were tested and proved to be in order. The Christchurch Drainage Board's pumping-station at Linwood was without power while the breakdown was on, and two men were trapped for about 20 minutes in the lift of a city office building. In the theatres those patrons who desired to leave, were given passout checks to enable them to attend later, and others remained, the end of the programme being reached a jtttle later in the afternoon than OBual. The electric trains on the fyttelton line were held up for a ■hort period. '