Thousands of Victorian homes still without power

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Victoria's ongoing blackout is being described as one of the most significant events the network has ever experienced.

Transcript

00:00 The power court says that this is the most significant outage that the network has ever

00:07 experienced.

00:08 We're talking about outages widespread across many parts of the state.

00:13 We've heard, for example, from a council member over in Phillip Island, which is southeast

00:18 of Melbourne, and they say that they have no power there.

00:22 There are also disruptions as well to telecommunications as a result.

00:27 And this, of course, all happened due to that massive storm, which ended up knocking out

00:33 six major transmission lines.

00:35 That then tripped and led to a power surge, which ended up tripping the Loy Yang Ao A

00:42 power station.

00:43 And so that's what's caused this.

00:45 We've heard from the energy market operator, AEMO, saying that it could take days, possibly

00:50 weeks, given the huge infrastructure difficulties that you can imagine have led to this, to

00:58 actually be able to get some of this power back on.

01:02 And we heard from Bruce Mountain.

01:04 He's the director of Victoria's Energy Policy Centre, and he's explained just what this

01:08 means for Victorians.

01:10 It means that we are going to be in quite a stressful situation.

01:18 The big coal-fired generator was knocked off the system from this.

01:22 It's been restored partially.

01:24 We've seen some energy production from it last night, but not yet fully.

01:30 We expect to be relying a great deal on gas.

01:33 We've also seen the Stockyard Hill wind farm lose supply, and we've seen a number of wind

01:38 farms that have been knocked out.

01:41 Steph, what can we expect for those battling blazes?

01:43 Yes, well, thankfully, the conditions have really eased somewhat.

01:48 We had those hugely big wind gusts of up to 100 kilometres per hour yesterday, fanning

01:55 the flames, as well as really high temperatures up in the high 30s and reaching towards the

02:00 40s up in the northwest of the state.

02:04 Thankfully we've seen that cool change come through, even though it brought these huge

02:08 storms.

02:09 So we're in much milder temperatures.

02:12 We've heard from the CFA's Chief Officer, Jason Heffernan, saying that he hopes that

02:17 this better weather will mean that they really can get absolutely on top of the fires, not

02:21 just in the states west around Bellfield and the Grampians National Park, but also Newton,

02:27 which is south of Ballarat.

02:29 And so they'll be continuing to use the heavy machinery to try to bring those blazes under

02:34 control.

02:35 Obviously, it is in difficult terrain, given the fact we're talking about national parks

02:40 and also forests where some of these fires are raging.

02:44 But we spoke to Miriam Bradbury, who is a senior meteorologist, and she basically explained

02:51 what the situation is for people in Victoria as far as the weather's concerned.

02:56 Well, it is good news on that front.

02:58 We've got much more settled conditions on the way today in the wake of that front.

03:02 So cooler weather, particularly through western Victoria, we're not expecting those temperatures

03:05 to reach more than the low to mid 20s.

03:08 And also moderate winds, but they'll be southerly winds, which means they'll be drier, but they'll

03:14 also be cooler.

03:15 So we do still have high fire dangers through the Wimmera, moderate fire dangers elsewhere.

03:20 So it's telling us the risk isn't over yet, but the conditions are certainly improved

03:24 on the weather front from what they were yesterday.

03:26 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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