WARNING OF DRASTIC POWER CUT IN SOUTH

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23219, 3 April 1950, Page 8

WARNING OF DRASTIC POWER CUT IN SOUTH

(P.A.) CHRISTCHURCH, April 1. Unless consumers co-operated by. saving power, drastic cuts were inevitable said the district engineer of the State Hydro-Electric Department, Mr. W. 11. Gregory, this morning. He quoted figures of power consumption in the South Island this week to show that up to 6.2 per cent more power than the allocation had been used.

“This cannot go on,” he said. 'T am not an alarmist when I say that the position generally is extremely serious.” Units totalling 800,000 had been drawn out of storage yesterday. Although consumers were supposed to keep the power demands down to the level for the corresponding week of last year, the peak demand in the main South Island system yesterday was 150.016 kilowatts, compared with the peak load of 146,230 kilowatts on the corresponding day in 1949. “At the moment we are eight or nine weeks aheads of the estimated drawoff in storage,” he continued. “The rivers feeding the lakes are lower than they would normally be if we had had a freeze-up. If we had a freeze-up now I do not know what would happen. The results would, to say the least, be extremely serious.” Mr. Gregory said that the flow in the Harper River to Lake Coleridge todav was the lowest ever recorded in the department's records, which went back for about 40 years. To counter this weak flow additional water was being drawn from the already-depleted storage at Lake Pukaki. The department was doing its best in a very ticklish situation, but it must have the cooperation of consumers if heavier restrictions were not to be imposed.