Humid weather causes power blackout in Perth's northern suburbs

Nearly 30,000 homes in Perth’s north are without power on Monday morning due to rain and humid weather damaging more than 20 power poles.

The suburbs impacted include Padbury, Kingsley, Craigie, Carramar and Greenwood, plus suburbs between Eglinton and Seabird in Perth’s outer northern corridor.

The mass outage comes after cloud cover prevented temperatures from dropping overnight, with the minimum hitting 21 degrees and some Perth areas experiencing 100 per cent humidity on Monday morning.

In a statement, Western Power said drizzly rain and humid weather had combined to cause about 21 pole top fires.

“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,” the statement read.

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

Crews are working to repair the poles, but each pole replacement can take between four and eight hours.

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

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