More than 90,000 homes and businesses in Victoria remain without power after a “catastrophic” storm lashed the state earlier this week.
It comes a 50-year-old dairy farmer died after the storms hit the South Gippsland region.
“There will be support there for those families and the broader community as well as we move through into that recovery phase,” Allan said.
“But we’re not at that recovery phase yet.”
The severe weather killed a dairy farmer in the state’s Gippsland region, an incident that is being investigated by WorkSafe Victoria.
It’s believed the 50-year-old was struck by a shed roof that detached in strong winds at Mirboo North.
“Our thoughts and support are with the family who lost a loved one,” Allan said.
“Authorities predicted catastrophic weather and that’s exactly what we saw0,0.”
Wild weather wreaks havoc
Parts of the state were left stranded and powerless almost a day after catastrophic fires and severe thunderstorms rolled through in a day of wild weather.
Power transmission lines were destroyed by the “catastrophic winds” near Geelong, culminating in a statewide blackout.
Around 15 hospitals lost power on Tuesday night, with five of hospitals still being powered by generators.
Authorities said almost 500 mobile phone towers across the whole range of networks has been impacted mainly due to power outages.
More than 250,000 NBN customers are still offline, with almost 5000 customers unable to make and receive calls on fixed-line networks.
Telstra is reporting that 41 communities are potentially isolated from all communication, meaning they also likely wouldn’t be able to contact triple zero.
The SES attended 4000 callouts across the state for trees down and building damage.
Most of the damage was centreed around Melbourne’s east and south at Monash, Emerald, Greater Dandenong, Knox and Moorabbin.
The outages caused NBN, Telstra and Vodafone services to go offline, while 40 per cent of AusNet’s customers had no access to electricity.
Roofs blown off houses after volatile storms lash Victoria
Businesses across the state were also left in the dark, with some concerned they would lose tens of thousands of dollars due to the outages.
Belgrave florist Mary-Christie told 9News she would lose up to $8000 on one of her busiest days of the year – Valentine’s Day.
”We had to send lots of customers away, we just don’t have an ATM available for them,” she said.
‘Days if not weeks’ to fix some power outages
Power has been restored to thousands of homes across the state, however, more than 90,000 homes and businesses remain in the dark.
The emergency management commissioner Rick Nugent warned it could be up to a week for some people to get power back.
“It is possible… up to a week in some areas,” Nugent said yesterday.
“Our focus at the moment is getting access to there, clearing the roads and getting access to all of the critical infrastructure.”
President of the Victorian Farmers Federation Emma Germano accused the government of a “complete lack of planning” ahead of the catastrophic weather.
“The impact on our industry and regional communities is immense and once again have been left to pick up the pieces,” Germano said.
“Victoria is still feeling the impact of one of our largest ever power blackouts and the complete lack of planning and resilience by the government is once against crippling our state.
Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) chief executive Daniel Westerman addressed media today, saying the weather didn’t directly cause the loss of power.
He said it did however force the operators to reduce energy load to protect the grid’s security.
“We didn’t lose any customer supply because of that event,” he told media.
“So power from Victoria was coming from wind and solar and batteries and hydro, connected in with other transmission at the time,” Westerman said.
“So after the transmission event, that sent shock waves through the power system – ultimately, because of the downing of transmission lines – around 2800 megawatts of generation went offline and about 1000 megawatts of appliances disconnected.
“People would have noticed that their air conditioners switched off and light flickered.”
Minister for Energy Lily D’Ambrosio also confirmed the loss of power but not an issue about an issue of energy supply.
“(Tuesday) was not about a lack of electricity supply,” she said.
“If I put it to you this way — if you’ve got a road infrastructure and a road collapses and you have a car full of petrol… and it’s got no road to travel on.
“It’s got its power, it’s got supply, but it can’t take it to where you want it to go.”
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