MORE than 19,000 customers were hit by a power black-out in Mount Gambier on Saturday, which was the second outage in a week.
The outage occurred at 4.30pm on Saturday and resulted in widespread power disruptions across the city.
Supermarkets, shopping centres and thousands of houses were thrown into darkness by the outage, with power restored to most customers within 45 minutes.
The outage also affected traffic signals across the city as a storm passed through the region.
SA Power Networks spokesperson Paul Roberts said the outage was caused by a lighting strike to ElectraNet infrastructure.
He said this was the second outage within a week following a party balloon causing an outage the previous weekend.
It is understood a balloon made contact with high voltage power lines on Kennedy Avenue, which triggered the previous black-out.
While this was not common, he said balloons occasionally did cause power outages.
“I have seen this happen before,” Mr Roberts said.
He said the balloon triggered a fault and the network was shut down as a precautionary measure to protect the infrastructure.
The weekend’s power outage comes as the city recorded more than 50mm of rain over a five-day period.
