Remote Northern Territory communities in West Arnhem Land are calling for a senate inquiry into connectivity in the bush in the wake of a three-week 3G Telstra outage.
Residents in the remote community of Maningrida are still dealing with the aftermath of the outage.
When the 3G power metres that allow residents to pay as they go stopped working properly, residents couldn’t see how much electricity they were using while the network was down.
The local council says that, when the 3G came back on three weeks later, people were not only hit with huge debts but also the disconnection of their electricity.
According to the local council there are now hundreds of people living without power.
Maningrida resident Rowena Cooper is one of them.
The aged care support worker has no fridge, washing machine, dryer or air conditioning, but in three weeks of not being able to see the meter gauge, she racked up a significant bill.
“I got shocked when I went back home and then I got told we in debt like 500 dollars,” she told NITV.
Rowena Cooper (second from right) and her family in Maningrida.
“We started to get stressed [about] how to find money and pay the power.”
Ms Cooper says she is having to reconnect the electricity every day.
“Every day we pay 20 dollars and 30 dollars so they can connect our power and it’s still in debit.”
Community struggling to pay bills
Karen Yarnold is the manager of the Mala’la Aged Care Centre in Maningrida and says the impact of the Telstra outages on clients have been significant.
“At the moment [Maningrida residents] have got these huge debts and it’s very stressful for clients and community to have these debts,” Karen Yarnold says.
“How are they going to pay them off?”
She says life in Maningrida is incredibly expensive, and people in the community don’t have a lot of money.
“Out of my own pocket I have spent about $110 last week, you put 20 [dollars] on here, 20 on there and really it’s not making a difference because they still owe an incredible amount,” Karen Yarnold says.
Karen Yarnold at Mala'la Aged Care Centre.
“I think the government really have a responsibility for making sure that something happens – Power and Water maybe need to come out in community and actually see what’s going on an fix it – wipe the debts and fix it so it doesn’t happen again.”
There are now calls for a senate inquiry with the communities of Maningrida and Wurruwi affected.
West Arnhem Regional Council Mayor Matthew Ryan says the response from governments and businesses would have been much swifter if this had happened in a suburban community.
“It’s quite appalling,” Matthew Ryan says.
The Northern Territory Government knows about the disadvantage that we live through, through the wet season and the dry season, you know communication is a must in the community.
The Northern Territory Minister for Essential Services Kate Worden says she has been investigating what went wrong.
“We have been talking to Telstra around that and the lack of communication that went out to the community, that’s the really important part,” Kate Worden says.
“We know that from time to time systems can go down, we have it here in town as well, we saw the massive outage from Optus last year.
“We just need to make sure that when there are those outages that Telstra actually communicates that to its customers and they need to also tell us.
She says Telstra’s communication to government was also lacking, but a spokesperson questioned the criticism's validity.
"We communicate outages every day to the NT Government and Power and Water were in regular communication with us about Maningrida," they said.
"As a side note, Telstra have arranged a meeting [Thursday] with Minister Worden to talk about connectivity in regional and remote NT, how we communicate issues and the recent outage in Maningrida."
Telstra also clarified it doesn’t manage power metres.
In a statement Telstra’s NT Regional Director Nic Danks said he was aware that the pre-paid meters used by Power and Water ran on 3G only and communicated regularly with them on their efforts to restore services.
He said the connection issues were initially caused by a mains power outage, and while 4G connection was fixed in 32 hours, repairing 3G took longer.
The Power and Water Corporations Belinda Small says an upgrade of systems at homes will help.
“Power and water have a meter replacement program to support the 3G change over [in July],” Belinda Small says.
“That program is currently ahead of schedule, and we will continue to focus on delivering that project into communities.”
Power and Water says it is helping clients through its financial hardship programs.
