Well I'm back home with power and some fans to move the hot air around. I've had a miserable couple of days.
The city got about an inch of rain so the trees weren't in boggy soil, the official BOM records show the wind never exceeded 100kph so few trees toppled. So driving around early 26th I only saw branches broken off, NO power lines down NO damaged buildings, NO traffic lights or roofing iron tangling power lines. There was so little damage that the city should have shrugged and been back to normal by lunch time. The power companies always have plenty of gangs on standby so I am not exaggerating.
So why were 60,000 homes out of power? It was only yesterday afternoon that my suburb with 1,000 customers got power back and there was no obvious damage. Driving around there is very little green stuff stacked on the kerb waiting to be picked up. Looking at the outage map there is still Alligator Ck. area with 1,000 customers in the dark.
I'm saying this, not to have a "poor fella me" whinge, but to warn you that this is coming to you, wherever you are, because this was NOT severe cyclone damage that takes time to repair because there was virtually no damage [max. wind gusts did not reach 100 kph] but a GRID failure, cascading exploding transformers or switch gear that the control room never got in front of. If you are on the grid there is no reason to think your supplier is better able to handle a storm than Ergon. By any reasonable measure this was just that - a storm, in spite of the BOM calling it cat. 3 and Cat. 2 as it made landfall.
