Younghusband resident Mick Morrissey said since Christmas there had been eight power outages.

“Six of these have happened at the same time on either a Monday or a Thursday,” Mr Morrissey said.

“Residents have been calling ETSA and they are getting the same response, which is not much. “I am dissatisfied with the customer service saying it’s birds on the wire.”

Mr Morrissey said residents needed a satisfactory answer.

“It happens at a regular time, regular day and it is a regular problem that they haven’t fixed,” he said.

“We need power as there is no mains water.

“We need the power to pump the water and we rely on electricity for the stove and oven as there is no natural gas.”

ETSA services general manager Sue Filby said the Teal Flat 11-kilovolt feeder had experienced eight outages since January 1, each affecting about 300 customers.

“The 45 kilometre-long line is patrolled in line with our regular inspection and maintenance program,” Ms Filby said.

“After a fresh line inspection, we replaced a faulty insulator and made some switch adjustments which we believed had solved issues identified in early December.

“Last week, we dispatched an asset inspector to undertake another detailed inspection of the line using sophisticated infrared and thermal imaging camera.”

Mrs Filby said the inspection of the line including 900 poles and 4500 insulators failed to reveal any faults with the company’s infrastructure.

Following information from a resident, ETSA discovered sections of the line between Younghusband and Bow Hill on the eastern side of the river had been swamped by flocks of corellas.

Mrs Filby said when the crew was on site, the power went off again in two sections of the line heavily occupied by the corellas. “When the corellas take off in mass, they set the lines swinging and clashing has obviously caused our protective equipment to operate to protect the network and customer’s electrical equipment,” she said.

“In order to tackle this problem, we have now installed bird scarers (fireflys) and additional fuses to minimise the number of customers potentially affected along the line. “We will continue to monitor the situation but we are confident that our efforts to sectionalise the line with additional fuses will help to reduce the number of customers impacted by these corellas.”