Tasmanian Government Seeking AU$122m From Basslink For Cable Outage
By Corinne Reichert, ZDNet
March 27, 2018
The Tasmanian government has announced that it is seeking AU$122 million in compensatory damages from Basslink under a notice of dispute it lodged this week following a months-long telecommunications and energy subsea cable outage.
After last week refuting claims by the state government that it breached the Basslink Operations Agreement (BOA) contract it has as the operator of the submarine cable, Basslink has again responded by saying it “strongly denies the allegations” set out in the notice of dispute.
“Basslink will follow the dispute resolution steps set out in the BOA to resolve the dispute,” the company said.
“However, if the dispute cannot be resolved, it would be referred to arbitration in accordance with the steps of the BOA, and Basslink intends to vigorously defend the matters raised in the notice.”
Basslink had last week also said it would “vigorously defend any legal action”.
“As part of the commissioning of the Basslink Interconnector in 2006, the Basslink Interconnector was rigorously tested to ensure the design and construction requirements were satisfied,” the company said.
“Given that the Basslink Interconnector was completed and commissioned more than a decade ago, Basslink is extremely surprised at these very belated allegations by the state and strenuously denies that any warranties under the BOA were breached.”
According to Basslink, an independent inspector had signed off the design, construction, and commissioning requirements.
“The state, through Hydro Tasmania, was very closely involved in the design, construction, and commissioning process. This involvement included attending various meetings with both Basslink and the manufacturers,” the company argued.
“Basslink maintains the cable failure was a force majeure event.”
The Tasmanian government had last week threatened to take legal action against Basslink after reports from two global experts provided to Hydro Tasmania in December found the Basslink subsea cable outage of 2015-16 was caused by Basslink exceeding its design limit, which then degraded the cable.