Printers across Brisbane and its surrounds have been badly affected by power outages after the region saw a severe thunderstorm on Sunday night.
Printers across the Logan region were unable to open for business on Monday in response to the outage, including companies such as Auzprint in Hillcrest, Promoplex in Eagleby, with printers closer to Brisbane city like Custom T-Shirt in Norman Park also closed.
Promoplex saw its power come back on at 4pm Monday afternoon. Jake Owen, managing director of says “We could not do anything. We could do some things on some computers, but it was not much. Production stopped. The phones were not working. We lost a day of work, creating money loss. It is difficult to try and recover. Any sort of downtime is very difficult to recover from.
“The power went down on Sunday night. Energex said it will be back Monday night at the latest, then it was Tuesday. 150,000 people were without power on the first night, then it went down to 60,000 and I guess they have been doing their best to recover it all.
“On the Energex website, they had the updates and we did not know when it was going to come back, they were saying Tuesday. The power goes out, it goes out and there is nothing we can do. We could get a generator but it would cost a fortune.
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“We have to catch up on our work now and I have a ton of emails to sort through. I needed to send out quotes and do other things, there were jobs yesterday that required certain attention then, so we might have a potential loss of revenue there.
“It is lost time, which is what costs the most in this business. It is the most precious commodity and it affects everything, it affects staff and it affects customers. But if the power goes out, we cannot do anything about it.
The Custom T Shirt Shop, a company in the Brisbane inner city suburb of Norman Park was down for all of Monday. Power was restored to the business on Monday night, with it being up and running as of today.
ProPrint spoke to David Seth, owner of The Custom T Shirt Shop on Monday, when the shop was still experiencing an outage. He says, “I have closed up shop for the day, sent my staff home and today I am working from home. The coffee shop down the street knew they were out of power when they came in at five past five this morning.
“We will get a further update tonight but it is an automated reply. It is frustrating. It feels like they do not care because you cannot get through to a real person and figure out what is going on. And as a business owner you have to make decisions on the fly.
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“It is very localised for us. One street over, the power is on heading out towards Cleveland Road. However it is a big block that is out of power.
“We cannot print anything at the shop, we cannot access the internet. We cannot do our line up of work. We are now one day behind on printing and we will have to do five days of printing in four, so we will be under the gun. Valentine’s Day is coming up, we would have gotten orders over the weekend but we cannot get into them.
“We do this thing called print on demand, where a customer should be able to walk in and get a t-shirt printed. Some people have come gone to the shop, given me a call and said what is going on. I have said the power is out, we cannot do anything so the shop is closed and some people feel like I have let them down so there has been a real negative impact to the business there.
“We plan on being at the shop tomorrow at 7 o’clock and hoping the power will be back on, if not, I do not know what we will do. Hopefully it is fully restored, otherwise if this continues, I may have to get a big generator and have it running out the back. I do not want to that, but that is what we have to do.
Around 60,000 residents were out of power yesterday. According the latest updates from Energex, the primary power supplier in Queensland, about 1770 still remain without working electricity. The most heavily affected region is to the south of Brisbane, in Logan City.
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