“We made it clear that there’s a level of service that people are accustomed to here,” Mr Katter said. 

“We need to be satisfied that it wasn’t just glitches in a new system, and we want to know what they can do to improve the reliability of the system going forward.” 

His understanding of the cause of the outage was that the generators need to restart when lightning strikes the station. Mr Katter questioned procedures and the length of time it to restart power supply to the region. 

“Everyone is aware of how much grief it causes in Mount Isa in the middle of summer when power goes out for three hours.” 

It was the second outage in a fortnight caused by lightning strikes at the station owned by APA Group. The previous outage happening on Wednesday, January 11. 

Mr Katter said a further meeting with Ergon Energy, which receives the power from the station and supplies it to customers in the region, will be arranged through the Minister for Energy, Mark Bailey. 

The meeting is likely to be held around February 14, the day that parliament resumes, Mr Katter said. 

“Ergon Energy’s responsibility is the reliability of supply,” Mr Katter said. “If the person supplying it doesn’t have a reliable source it make sit difficult especially since there’s only one big supplier here.” 

The outage on Sunday affected 9927 Ergon customers in Mount Isa and Cloncurry. The outage started at 11.15am and the total restoration of power happened at 4.11pm. 

The outage affected businesses such as Harvey Norman, which closed for the day. Franchisee Brad Sheppard said minor water damage also happened in the back of the store. 

“We had a bit of cleaning on Monday morning and Sunday night,” he said.