A small grass fire along Darbys Falls Road on Sunday, 16 November, caused power disruptions across Cowra and surrounding villages.

The fire, which ignited just before midday, prompted both ground crews and aerial support to respond under total fire ban conditions.

The fire was located just before the turnoff to Jukes Lane and Camp Road.

Essential Energy confirmed that the incident caused an unplanned outage, affecting customers across the wider Cowra region.

“A power outage affecting approximately 580 customers occurred in the Cowra region on Sunday at 11.50am, after a fault on the network triggered safety equipment to turn off the electricity supply until crews could investigate,” a spokesperson said.

The outage affected 582 customers according to Essential Energy’s notification issued under reference INCD-267361-Q.

Impacted areas included Cowra, Darbys Falls, Garland, Lyndhurst, Mount McDonald, Roseberg, Woodstock, Wyangala and surrounding areas.

With the Central West under a total fire ban, Essential Energy had to carry out extra safety patrols of the network before the fault could be repaired and power safely restored.

“Due to a total fire ban in the region, additional patrols of the network were required before power could be safely restored after the fault was repaired,” the spokesperson said.

Crews restored electricity just after 4.45pm, nearly five hours after the outage began.