MELBOURNE, Australia: A storm packing strong winds uprooted trees, killed one person and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in eastern Australia, officials said Wednesday.
Wild weather battered large areas of Victoria on Tuesday, unleashing torrential rain and unleashing some gusts of more than 150 kilometers per hour (90 mph), officials said.
A 50-year-old dairy farmer was killed in the storm after he was apparently hit by flying debris while riding a tractor east of Melbourne, officials said at a news conference.
The winds also fueled fires in the Grampians region west of Melbourne, which burned an unknown number of homes in one small town, they said.
At its peak, 530,000 homes and businesses lost power, Australia’s energy market operator said in an update.
As of Wednesday morning, approximately 285,000 people were still cut off.
“Due to the extent of the extensive damage, it may take days, if not weeks, to restore power to all those affected,” the authority said.
According to media reports and images shared on social media, the wind ripped off roofs, uprooted trees and leveled power poles.
Fallen transmission towers led to the shutdown of Victoria’s largest electricity generator, coal-fired Loy Yang A, which is now reconnecting to the grid, the state energy agency said in a statement.
According to Victoria’s Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio, this was one of the largest outages in the state’s history.
Lightning strikes sparked “multiple fires” in Victoria, state emergency management commissioner Rick Nugent said.
In the hard-hit Grampians region, flames burned “a number of residential houses” in Pomonal, home to several hundred people, Nugent told a news conference.
It was too early to say how many homes were affected, he added.
Authorities said they were working to restore power and determine the full extent of the fire’s damage as fire and weather warnings were lowered across the state.
