Authorities warn there’s no quick fix for thousands of Victorians without power after six transmission line towers collapsed near Anakie.
Emergency Management Victoria has an estimated 280,000 people without power after yesterday’s storms, down from a peak of over 500,000.
Almost 2,000 homes and businesses in Lara remain without power this morning following Tuesday’s brief but intense storm.
CFA, SES, Powercor and Geelong council crews were kept busy well into the night, cleaning up roads from downed trees and fixing powerlines.
The crumpled transmission lines caused Victoria’s largest coal-fired generator Loy Yang A to trip and go offline, with the state’s Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio describing the blackouts as one of the largest outage event’s in the state’s history.
The state control centre’s James Todd says power crews have a task ahead of them getting people back on line given the scale of destruction, including much of Lara.
“There’s major issues with the main transmission lines with those towers down near Anakie,” he said.
“There’s also power lines down as a result of tree fall and those severe winds yesterday, so it will be some time before those services are returned.”
Dry lightning brought by yesterdays wild weather after temperatures nudged 40 in the state’s west sparked several fires, including two near the Grampians that are still out of control and have impacted homes.
Mr Todd says homes near Pomonal east of the Grampians are likely to have been lost as hundreds of fire crews tackle a fire there and another further north that’s jumped the Western Highway near Dadswells Bridge and is heading north east towards Glenorchy.
“We’ve still got some concerns about that, there’s no immediate threat to homes or houses in that area but obviously we’ll be maintaining a watching brief on that fire and doing what we can to bring it under control,” he said.
The fire has shut the Western Highway and the main east-west rail freight line.
Two other fires in the state’s west were downgraded overnight, one south of Beaufort and another near Newton south of Ballarat.
