By Tania Martin
A MACCLESFIELD woman has called for answers after her two-year-old son, husband and horse narrowly escaped electrocution when a live powerline was left unattended for hours.
Julie Buxton said the drama all unfolded shortly after 4pm on Friday 22 January.
Wild winds brought down a tree branch and high voltage powerline in her yard.
Mrs Buxton said both her neighbour and husband made separate calls to the power utility, SP AusNet.
Both were concerned over fire risk from the line.
“My husband rang them and told them about the powerline and it was arcing among the fallen trees,” Mrs Buxton said.
“They were told someone would be out soon.”
Minutes later, Mr Buxton was leaning against the wooden post of his fence talking to his neighbour, unaware the live powerline was lying across it.
“My husband was standing there with my two-year-old son…luckily he didn’t touch the wire, just the wooden pole,” Mrs Buxton said.
It wasn’t until one of the Buxtons’ horses suddenly dropped to the ground that they realised something was wrong.
“Our horse touched the fence and got a nasty shock, sending all 500 kilograms of him to his knees,” Mrs Buxton said.
Half an hour later Mr Buxton called the power utility after crews still had not arrived.
He was told that no call had been logged.
“My husband explained they needed to send someone out straight away or turn the power off, as it was starting a fire,” Mrs Buxton said.
Mrs Buxton arrived home 10 minutes later and discovered the power had still not been turned off and that the ground beneath the line had started to burn.
She then called SPAusNet back and was told it wasn’t a priority.
“I demanded the power be switched off,” Mrs Buxton said.
An SP AusNet spokeswoman said the utility received a call shortly after 4.30pm and based on information provided to the faults line the job was prioritised for crews working in the area.
“When our fault crew arrived on scene, they were able to provide a more detailed description of the fault to our operations centre, resulting in the powerline being immediately de-energised and the incident escalated to a high priority,” she said.
The Buxtons called the CFA who arrived soon after to assess the situation but were unable to do anything because of the live powerline.
“But it was comforting having them here in case of a fire,” Mrs Buxton said.
The power was switched off shortly after 6.30pm at the main switch just six kilometres from the Buxtons’ home.
Mrs Buxton is finding it hard to understand why the power could not have been switched off sooner.
She has questioned what the power utility is doing to fix infrastructure issues like this especially as many of the Black Saturday fires were caused by similar problems.
Mrs Buxton has also questioned what the State Government is doing to bring in better standards and procedure for power utilities.
The Mail was unable to get a State Government response before going to print.
