Generator fails leaving thousands without power in Far West NSW

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Major power outages at Broken Hill, in far west New South Wales have forced the closure of state schools with authorities warning it could be a fortnight before a stable flow of electricity is restored.

Transcript

00:00Residents across the Far West have now been without power since 5pm yesterday afternoon.

00:07Now we're told from TransGrid that the region's sole generator tripped overnight and they're

00:13now planning to send four large generators to help power the region as soon as possible.

00:18But at this stage we are not expecting any power to be returned to the Far West until

00:23later this afternoon.

00:24Now we spoke with a local business operator who told us that she's incredibly frustrated

00:29by this scenario, and even more so that she's lost all of her perishable stock.

00:34We'll hear from her now.

00:35The staff don't know when they're going to be able to come in and work.

00:38We've pretty much just put everything on hold for now.

00:40I know, look, the workers here on the ground, the Central Energy, a lot of those guys, you

00:44know, we see them every day, you know, they're working their hearts out to kind of get the

00:48power back on, but, you know, this should never have happened in the first place.

00:53Yeah, I don't really know what much more to say.

00:57It's so frustrating, it's ridiculous.

01:00And we've also seen this morning that locals have been lining up for petrol with many of

01:04the stations around the community being closed.

01:08In terms of the community and the kind of funding that they'll be able to get, we found

01:11out last night that the state and federal government have announced that the region

01:15will be able to access the Disaster Recovery Fund.

01:19Now that funding will provide councils with the money to restore damaged public assets

01:24and provide immediate support to any essential services, so we're talking about schools

01:29and hospitals and that sort of thing.

01:31But at this point we're still waiting to hear what the exact funding amount will be, and

01:35as you can imagine, locals are eager to find out what support will be accessible to them

01:39at an individual level.

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