When Raymond Day-Hakkar, the owner of the Golden Era Piano Museum in Neville woke on Saturday morning, he was pleasantly surprised to discover that the village that he calls home was blanketed in a deep cover of snow.
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What he was less impressed by was the fact that the electricity supply to his, and another 286 homes, was non-existent.
This was no short-term cut either, Mr Day-Hakkar said that the power was out from around 9am through to 2.10pm on the Saturday and from 7am to 11.45am on Sunday.
Although accepting that the heavy snowfalls had likely played a part in the outage, he's not confident that proposed staff cuts at Essential Energy will help the response times into the future.
"Imagine the wait times if they go ahead and sack all the staff that they say they're going to," he said.
Mr Day-Hakkar said that businesses such as his and the Neville Hotel and the Neville Sidings all suffered from a lack of electricity on the weekend.
"When the power goes out here for a lot of people it means you can't use your toilet or anything, let alone turn on the heating," he said.
"What about all the older people who no longer use wood-fires as they find them hard to operate?"
A spokesperson for Essential Energy confirmed that the blackout was caused by the heavy snowfalls across the district.
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"Heavy snowfalls, reportedly the heaviest in five years, caused multiple powerlines to break and fall due to the sheer weight of the snow on them," he said.
"The electricity network automatically switched power off to 286 homes and businesses in the Neville area at 9.16am on Saturday after sensing a fault.
"Crews worked as quickly as safety allowed and, after rerouting the electricity network around the problem, restored power to 156 customers at 10.06am. Power was fully restored to all customers at 2.09pm."
"On Sunday, for similar safety reasons, the electricity network again switched power off to 286 homes and business in the Neville area at 6.58am."
Mark Logan
Started working in newspapers in the 1990's in the darkroom of the Pastoral Times in Deniliquin before moving to Millthorpe in 2003. Soon after arriving I started as a photographer at the CWD. Now a journalist at the Blayney Chronicle.
Started working in newspapers in the 1990's in the darkroom of the Pastoral Times in Deniliquin before moving to Millthorpe in 2003. Soon after arriving I started as a photographer at the CWD. Now a journalist at the Blayney Chronicle.
