00:00Residents in Broken Hill started their morning with another unplanned outage.
00:06This single mother of two had to toss out an entire freezer's worth of food at a time when she's moving house.
00:13We've literally been living off of noodles and pasta for the past couple of days and using that little gas cooker.
00:20One of her daughters has cerebral palsy, among other conditions which require her to consume specific food.
00:27It's really frustrating because it's not just affecting me, it's affecting my children.
00:31Random blackouts, what are we meant to do in that time, who's going to help us?
00:35The blackouts extend far beyond Broken Hill, with Menindee, Wolcania and Tiburbara on the Queensland border among those suffering power outages.
00:45In Menindee, community members like Rob Gregory are hard at work.
00:50The head of tourism is also an electrician. He's been connecting generators constantly around town to keep the lights on.
00:58You help out where you can and I've been connecting up all the RFS generators into the community hall, into the service station.
01:06We've had no lines to ring triple O until the RFS come into town.
01:12While the power is back on here in Menindee and operating more reliably than in Broken Hill,
01:17directives to stay away from the region to conserve power have had an impact on tourism.
01:22It's yet another blow on top of what has already been a slow season.
01:27This is the last four weeks of our tourist season and usually it starts to peak up now and that hasn't happened.
01:33With plenty of water in the once lifeless Lake Menindee, there's optimism in the air tourists will flood back once the power is reliable.
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