What happened

A major fire engulfed Hydro Tasmania's Tungatinah Power Station while the remotely operated plant was generating. Emergency services received the first call at about 20:50 AEST on 2 September and found the building fully involved and beginning to collapse; around 45 Fire Service and State Emergency Service personnel responded, and the blaze was contained during the early hours of 3 September. No employees or contractors were present and no injuries were reported. The station has five turbines, 142.2 MW of capacity and supplies just under 5% of Tasmania's electricity at full output. Hydro Tasmania began bringing the gas-fired Tamar Valley Power Station back online to cover the lost generation and said there had been no load shedding, customer impact or threat to statewide system security. TasNetworks separately listed outages affecting roughly 300 customers around Tarraleah, Brady's Lake and Bronte Park as caused by a pole fire; the reviewed evidence does not establish that those distribution outages were caused by the Tungatinah station blaze, so they are not counted as its operational impact. Fire investigators and police were examining the cause, which remained unknown, and no malicious act had been alleged. Firefighting runoff was contained in consultation with the Environment Protection Authority. The station coordinates are sourced from the Global Hydropower Tracker.

When cited sources give different casualty, damage or spill figures for this event, they’re reported side by side above rather than merged into one number. See how confidence levels work.