Power has now been restored to around 300,000 homes, businesses and other properties which were blacked out when severe storms swept across NSW, and energy crews and NSW State Emergency Service volunteers are working hard to connect the remaining 8,600 customers.
Violent electrical storms late on Wednesday 15 January damaged energy infrastructure and brought down trees and powerlines, before gale-force winds hit on Friday 17 January.
Since Wednesday, the SES has received more than 8,700 call outs, with many incidents involving live power lines. Crews will continue responding to incidents over the next few days.
At the height of Wednesday's storms 226,000 customers lost power, and on Friday, more than 70,000 were disconnected. Some homes and businesses were hit by both weather systems.
While power has been restored to the vast majority thanks to the work of SES volunteers and Ausgrid, Endeavour Energy and Essential Energy workers, the severity of the damage has caused some prolonged outages. Some of these jobs have required complete re-builds of parts of the network, which have taken several days to complete. Some are in isolated locations.
Ausgrid is advising customers some outages will continue into early this week. Essential Energy workers are now supporting Ausgrid in its clean up and restoration efforts.
As of 6am Monday 20 January, around 8,600 homes and business across NSW were without power.
Ausgrid has 8,500 customers without power:
- 1,500 in Newcastle/Hunter, including 350 in Port Stephens
- 1,000 Central Coast
- 6,000 in Sydney
More than 200,000 Ausgrid customers have been impacted by the storms.
- Endeavour Energy has around 100 customers without power in Sydney.
This is down from a total of 78,000 Endeavour Energy customers impacted by the storms.
- Essential Energy has restored all power outages from the storms.
A total of 31,500 Essential Energy customers were impacted.
The safety of the community and energy crews is the number one priority as crews work to get the power back on.
Residents are urged to follow these safety measures:
- Always assume a fallen wire is live and dangerous, stay at least 8 metres clear of them.
- Avoid wires that are hanging low, on the ground or tangled in trees and storm debris.
- Never drive across fallen powerlines.
- Report fallen powerlines immediately by calling your electricity distributor:
- If you're using a portable generator for power, avoid deadly exhaust fumes entering your home.
