POWER has been restored to some towns and locations in Gippsland but many parts of South Gippsland and Bass Coast are still without power.
Power was still off in Wonthaggi, for example, at 10.15am Wednesday with no traffic lights, no petrol being pumped, schools open for working families to send their children, many shops and businesses closed without power, and Coles supermarket operating on generators but with Telstra services up and operating from early morning.
There have been reports that South Gippsland Water is using battery back-up to pump sewerage.
Karen Winsbury, GM Communications and Brand at AusNet Services spoke on ABC Radio this morning confirming it as the worst outage in the state’s history and likely to be days before power is restored.
She said 30,000 customers in Gippsland are without power, but anecdotally at least, there appears to be many more without power.
“I can't speak for Loy Yang, but I believe it is operational. So, in terms of the network, what I can tell you is that across AusNet’s entire network we currently have about 226,000 customers without power and about 30,000 of those are in the Gippsland area.
“Across the state yesterday. I think I saw the numbers, it was over 500,000, perhaps as high as about 550,000 at some point.
“As people would know, the storm damage passed from west to east of the state. Those in the west, they're having their power restored. In the east, where we are, it's taking a little bit longer because we were still seeing some of that storm impact well into last night.”
Ms Winsbury couldn’t say when power would be restored in Gippsland although some areas and towns have since come back online.
“That is something that we are urgently working on at the moment. I do have to tell customers that this is going to be a multi-day restoration event.
“This is the most significant outage in our history. We are working 24/7 even still to assess all the damage. And so, what we will be doing is prioritising those parts of the network where we can get the most amount of customers on at once.
“And as I say, we're still actually finding out where all of those faults are. So, we should know a little bit more later today what that timing looks like.”
With winds gusting above 125km/h at places like Yarram, the storm created a lot of damage, she said.
“It was just hard and fast, what I would say as devastating winds. I've seen photographs of wires all tangled together. We've got reports of lots of trees over power lines, power lines that are down and obviously the damage to a major infrastructure as well.
“It is going to be multi-day event. And I can only apologise to customers for that. We are working extraordinarily hard. We have extra crews available that we brought on to do this, as others have been working overnight. And as we get more information about those updated restoration times, to give people as much notice as possible, we will be sending direct messages via text and on our Facebook page and of course by the ABC as well.”
Here's an example of the messages going out, this one received by customers in Wonthaggi:
“We're investigating the power outage for (this area). We'll send an assessment crew out to investigate on-site by 6.42pm Tuesday, February 13. For status updates, check the Outage Tracker at https://www.outagetracker.com.au
Although, the AusNet Outage Tracker map has been periodically offline due to the number of people trying to access it.
“We'll send you regular updates as we learn more.”
