Thousands of homes without power in Perth's north as motorists ...

Thousands of homes in Perth‘s north have been left without power and motorists have been warned to take extra care on the wet roads with traffic lights down.

Early morning drizzle has caused fires to flare on power poles across the city’s northern suburbs, leaving about 28,000 homes and businesses without power.

The worst affected areas are Stirling, Wanneroo and Joondalup, with about 30 power poles catching fire.

“Pole top fires can occur during light drizzling rain or misty damp conditions when a combination of recent dust and pollution builds up to create paths or ‘tracks’ on the insulators, enabling electricity to jump across,” a Western Power spokesperson said.

“This tracking electricity can heat elements of the pole infrastructure to a point where they smoulder and burn.

“Crews are working to make hazards safe as a priority and will assess poles for replacement.

“Each pole change can take between four to eight hours, depending on the type of pole and complexity of the work.

“We understand the inconvenience the outages are causing. We are communicating with customers directly impacted via SMS.”

More than 5340 people have been left without power in Yanchep and Two Rocks through to Woodridge and beyond.

Thousands have also lost power in the closer northern suburbs of Duncraig, Greenwood, Kingsley and Padbury.

Another 2930 customers encompassing Wanneroo and Tapping through to Pinjar and Mariginiup are also without access to electricity.

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The outages have left several suburbs without traffic lights, with blackouts in a number of suburbs including Malaga, Westminster, Balga, Balcatta, Karrinyup and Hamersley.

Main Roads has advised motorists to approach traffic intersection with extreme caution, slow down and give way to their right.

“Western Power’s network maintenance programs are constantly improving the way assets are managed, including the 860,000 poles in the network,” the spokesperson said.

“We have a comprehensive poles and wires maintenance programs and preventative programs which includes live line high pressure washing and silicon application using helicopter, insulator replacements and managing trees and vegetation near wires.

“Work was continually underway to minimise the risk of pole top fires across the network to increase resilience, however climate chance impacts on weather patterns were challenging.”

Western Power advises that those who see a fallen power line to stay at least eight metres away and call the utility’s emergency line on 13 13 51.

More information on the blackout situation is available here.