It's been revealed Northland's power crisis was caused by contractors removing too many nuts from the base plates of the power pylon that toppled on Thursday.
Around 100,000 properties were left in the dark, and compensation is now on the minds of affected Northlanders.
On Monday, Transpower's CEO didn't hesitate to throw maintenance contractor Omexom under the bus.
Alison Andrew said it's "unprecedented and inconceivable that so many nuts were removed at once".
The failure to follow procedure during a routine cleaning resulted in a major power outage to 100,000 customers - an admission that's taken four days to come.
"Basically, what our people have done on-site has caused this to happen," Omexom New Zealand managing director Mornez Green said.
Pictures from the scene suggest at least 24 nuts were removed. Transpower said all nuts on the three baseplates were removed, when the usual protocol is to remove one nut at a time on one leg, before replacing it and moving to the next.
It took four days to confirm this because Transpower said the priority was to secure the site after what could have easily been a fatal accident.
The next priority was to restore power and only then, Transpower said, to establish the cause - even though Newshub cameras on Thursday appeared to identify the problem from hundreds of metres away.
"I think as you say from the pictures, people would make up their own minds. It's very important for us to understand what had caused that - was there a saboteur involved, was there corrosion issues with the tower," Andrew said.
Green stands by the competency of the crew - one of whom needed to be a qualified transmission line mechanic. The other two would have undergone a grid skills in-house training programme.
All three have been stood down while all base plate work across the country is suspended.
Northland businesses have greeted the admission with incredulity.
"Clearly it's incompetence in some way, shape or form and highly rare. But that admits guilt and blame and we're looking to be compensated," Northland Chamber of Commerce (NorthChamber) CEO Darryn Fisher said.
Transpower said under the Consumer Guarantees Act, customers can apply to their electricity retailer for compensation.
"Quoting the Consumer Guarantees Act is a bit of a copout really. I think we need to be compensated fairly," Fisher said.
But the admission of fault appears to open the door for the retailers to recoup those losses further down the chain.
NorthChamber estimates lost revenue at $60 to 80 million, but full compensation could be much higher.
Transpower hopes to restore full power to Northland by Matariki on Friday.
