Parts of Nelly Bay, the whole of Arcadia and Horseshoe Bay were hit by a seven hour black out last night during very hot and humid conditions.

According to Ergon sources, the cause of the outage is still unknown but at 3.30am the Ergon crew discovered a sparking power line near the Nelly Bay cemetery. A conductor was found on the ground nearby and following this the crew was able to undertake repairs and power was restored to most of the Island by 6.15 and the remainder by 7.15am.

That wasn't much consolation however to the hundreds of Islanders who would have suffered lack of sleep, sweltering without fans or air conditioning in what Townsville Bureau of Meteorology meteorologist, Doug Fraser, described a night time temperature of 27.5C that "doesn't get much warmer"and with humidity over 80% on Magnetic Island. The highest January nightime minimum was 29 degrees C on January 22nd 1994.

The blackout had little effect on the Magnetic Island Supermarket cooler rooms according to Alice Domelow who had to return to the shop in the middle of the night to attend the outage as the supermarket's electrical system requires manual switching. Due to the outage's timing cold rooms remained shut and it seems were able to sustain reasonable temperatures. The Horseshoe Bay AUR Express Store was, apparently also mostly unaffected.

The Ergon spokesperson apologised to Islanders for their uncomfortable night.

Further investigation as to why the conductor had fallen will be made but the Ergon spokesperson explained that the black out could have been caused by a possum or a flying fox.