The Waratah Hotel was hit the hardest, having to close entirely, but power problems forced Coles to shut shop for a period of time and left shoppers amid flickering lights as Woolworths had to rely on its generators for a spell.

Country Energy regional general manager, Peter Halliwell, said the total system breakdown occurred at around 5.15pm Monday and affected most of the centre of town.

“The technicians believe some high voltage wires took a hit from a lightning strike during the storms last week.

“It didn’t take the power out then, but it most certainly weakened the wires and for whatever reason (Monday), they snapped.

“Power was restored in just over half an hour but some equipment may have needed resetting,” he said.

Waratah Hotel manager, Ross Julius said the surge blew the exhaust fan in the kitchen.

“Without the exhaust fan it’s just too hot in there so we had to shut down the restaurant for the night.

“The cool room also went down and there was no air conditioning.

“At one stage none of the tills were working, so it really created some problems for the business,” he said.

He said he had not had a chance to assess the cost of the damage to the business and electricians were still fixing the problem.

Electrician Greg Dawe was still trying to restore full power to the hotel at midday yesterday.

“There is a lot of power coming into the hotel to run all the equipment. When the power failure occurred it took out one link and caused the whole system to crash.

“There is still no air conditioning, no exhaust fan and no juice to run the cool room,” he said.

Woolworths manager, Ross Armstrong said the store experienced the power failure but there was little interruption as the back-up generators immediately kicked in.