Thousands of households in the Tekapo and Albury are affected after two of the lines company's conductors were severed.
The pilot was safe and no one else was reported injured. Transpower estimated power would be restored this afternoon.
Tekapo community board chair and local real estate agent Steve Howes told RNZ's Morning Report programme there were a number of Chinese and Japanese visitors staying in town during national holidays in their countries.
They were struggling to understand what was going on, he said.
"It's really the management of guest management, they just don't understand how a small town can be without power."
The outage was also causing "really massive issues" for businesses in town, particularly restaurants and hospitality, he said.
Kerr himself was powering his house from his electric vehicle and said he had been driving round to help others.
He acknowledged such outages were not common and the cause was unexpected, but it was "a lesson in resilience," he said.
Alpine Energy chief customer and strategy officer Andrew Kerr told Morning Report about 1750 households in Tekapo were without power.
Workers had managed to reconfigure the network to get most people restored in the Fairlie area yesterday.
Although people were being asked to conserve power there so as many households as possible could be kept on, he said.
"We're working with Transpower... essentially we're waiting for them to fix the lines (that were) affected by the helicopter."
The system serving Tekapo was separate and "most people in Tekapo will be without power".
Generators were being used to supply some public services, such as the fire station, public toilets and community centre, he said.
The community centre would be open today for anyone need to charge their phone or get a cup of tea.
