THE Swan Hill region was battered on Tuesday by fierce winds, downing trees, damaging powerlines and plunging homes into darkness.
More than 1400 customers across northern Swan Hill were impacted by the outage on Tuesday afternoon.
The region was hit by strong rain band and howling winds, with speeds up to 117km/h, while there were power outages further afield in Sea Lake, Quambatook and Wycheproof.
It was believed the power outage in Swan Hill was localised after an uprooted tree brought down a power pole and lines on Saleyards Road.
Most homes saw light again within hours, but other parts of Victoria were not as lucky.
At the peak of the storm, more than 500,000 homes and businesses lost power.
Power had been restored to thousands of homes, however 72,000 homes and businesses remained in the dark as of Thursday.
Six electricity transmission towers in Victoria collapsed west of Geelong.
As a result, there were “widespread power outages” and extremely high power prices as coal-fired generator Loy Yang A was forced to shut down and disconnect from the grid.
“Severe winds and thousands of lightning strikes have causes significant damage to poles, wires and other electrical infrastructure,” Powercor said in a statement on Wednesday.
“We are responding to more than 640 different faults, including fallen powerlines.
“If people do see a fallen powerline, they should stay well away from them and report them to us immediately on 13 24 12. Please always assume a powerline is live.
“Due to the large volumes and complexity of the damage, restoration times will be longer than usual and some customers may be without power for multiple days.
“We have extra crew, control and customer centre resources on board working into the evening to respond and restore power as safely and as quickly as possible.”
Storm damage was to blame for the outages and not the fallen transmission lines, Australian Energy Market Operator chief executive Daniel Westerman said.
But the towers’ collapses caused the shutdown of Loy Yang A and several wind farms.
“It sent shockwaves through the transmission system,” he told reporters.
The collapse tripped about 2800 megawatts of generation offline, along with about 1000MW of appliances and lights, forcing AEMO to instruct operator AusNet to reduce its load.
In doing so, about 90,000 customers were kicked off the network in the first 30 minutes.
Loy Yang A generates about 30 per cent of Victoria’s power.
During the storm, Swan Hill recorded just 3.6mm of rain.
